Assessing environmental performance trends in the transport industry: Eco-innovation or catching-up?

This paper analyses the change in environmental performance that took place in the transport industry of 38 countries between the years 1995 and 2009. Data Envelopment Analysis techniques and directional distance functions are employed to compute Luenberger productivity indicators for the change in environmental performance and its determinants, namely, environmental technical change resulting from eco-innovation and catching-up with best available environmental technologies. Eight air pollutants account for the environmental contaminants from transport activities, and these are aggregated into three main categories of environmental pressures, namely, global warming, tropospheric ozone formation and acidification potentials. Furthermore, performance evaluation is based on how these specific environmental pressures are managed. Our principal findings show that there has been a noticeable improvement in environmental performance since the 1990s, primarily as a result of eco-innovations; moreover, this improvement has been markedly greater in low- and middle-income economies, bolstered, in this case, by both environmental technical progress and catching-up. These results reveal the need for policy measures aimed at encouraging catching-up with best available technologies, particularly in more developed countries. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.