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This paper contributes to the effort to model and measure how the method of financing of health expenditure affects the efficiency with which better health can be achieved. The focus is on the health system efficiency at the country level, which provides an alternative to the work done in the WHO in this regard. The approach uses frontier techniques as in the WHO studies; however the paper appeals to the economic index number theory of quantity and productivity indexes, which have well-established axiomatic properties, and provides a means for aggregating multiple health output proxies without having to attach arbitrary weights. This allows the proposal of a specification that embeds health sector performance in a broader index of economic inputs and outputs and allows for comparisons across countries and time. © 2006 Taylor & Francis.

Cataloged from PDF version of article. The role of the environment is an important issue in the policy-making and hence, the accurate assessment of the environmental conditions is vital. In this paper, an environmental efficiency index is developed for the OECD countries using non-parametric techniques. The approach adopted is based on the assumption that there is just one production process behind the production of both goods and pollution emissions. The index derived in this work measures the extent of the required output sacrifice, due to the transformation of the production process, from one where all outputs are strongly disposable to the one which is characterized by weak disposability of pollutants. Using this index, we first conduct cross-section comparisons on the state of each country's production process in its treatment of pollution emissions. We then trace each country's modification of their production processes overtime. The results indicate that if the disposability for CO2 emissions were strictly restricted as the result of an environmental regulation, the total value of output loss to the OECD countries as a whole would correspond to 3.7, 4.8 and 3.5% of the total OECD GDP for 1980, 1985 and 1990, respectively. (C) 2000 Academic Press.

The role of the environment is an important issue in policy making andthe accurate assessment of the environmental conditions is vital. Inthis paper, using nonparametric techniques, an environmental efficiencyindex is developed for each of the OECD countries. These indexes allowone both to do cross section comparisons on the state of each country'sproduction process in its treatment of undesirable outputs and also totrace each country's modification of their production processesovertime. Furthermore in this study we investigate the factorsunderlying societies' environmental concerns that eventually lead tochanges in the environmental efficiency. The results provide furtherempirical evidence for the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis.

Chapter 10 The last decade has witnessed major improvements in the measurement of sustainable human development. Considerable time and research effort have been devoted to both extending the dimensions of the measurement and the methodology used to compute sustainable human development indices. Now, the measurement of human well-being is not only limited to economic indicators but also takes into account social, institutional and ecological background, thus utilizing over 130 indicators approved by the United Nations in April 1995 (UN 2001). Improvements in the data collection of indicators, while triggering the construction of indexes from a series of constituent indicators such as human development index (HDI) with component indicators on longevity, educational attainment and income, have also led to aggregation of indexes of different dimensions. As a typical example of the latter, one can cite Prescott-Allen’s (2001) human well-being index (HWI), which is an equal weighted average of the human well-being index and ecosystem well-being index (EWI), integrating two indices with social-economical and environmental dimensions.

This paper starts with the basic premise: that conventional measures of productivity growth-often used as a measure of corporate performance-which ignore external or social output, are biased. We then construct an alternative productivity growth measure using activity analysis which integrates the externality/social output into a generalized productivity measure reflecting social responsibility. This method is very general and could be applied to gauge corporate social responsibility. We provide an application to US agriculture to demonstrate the approach: We show that conventional measures of productivity are biased upward when production of negative externalities (or bad) outputs is increasing. Conversely, this same measure of productivity is biased downward when externalities in production are decreasing. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.