Eco-efficiency analysis of French firms: a data envelopment analysis approach

This paper addresses the issue of assessing eco-efficiency when good and undesirable outputs are jointly produced. We propose that eco-efficiency can be decomposed into two parts: resource efficiency and ecological efficiency. We provide a conceptual framework based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to measure and benchmark eco-efficiency. The study is conducted between 2011 and 2012 using real data from 17 French firms belonging to the services to consumers industry, by developing DEA-based models. The results indicate that only three firms in the sample of the study are relatively eco-efficient. We find that eco-efficiency is closely related to environmental efficiency. The results also show that company size, expressed in terms of turnover and number of employees, is inversely related to eco-efficiency scores. © 2015, Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies and Springer Japan.