Evaluating Efficiency of Russian Regional Environmental Management Systems

The purpose of this work is to develop an approach to assess the effectiveness of the environmental management systems of the regions of the Russian Federation. The effectiveness of EMS in this study is proposed to be understood in a purely economic sense: as the ratio of the indicator characterizing the improvement of the environmental aspects of the region's economy to the costs incurred to achieve this improvement over a period of time. The study contributes to the literature in several areas: 1) an approach has been proposed for defining a regional environmental management system as an aggregate of regional institutions that manage budgetary and extrabudgetary funds for environmental protection; 2) a method was proposed for evaluating the effectiveness of regional EMS based on the use of DEA models with negative outputs; 3) an evaluation of the effectiveness of the EMS regions of the European part of Russia was carried out, effective and inefficient regions were identified, the amounts of funds spent inefficiently were determined; 4) the hypothesis was verified that the size of the region's economy (assessed by GRP volume and population size) affects the efficiency of the EMS, and this effect is negative.