Frontier models for evaluating environmental efficiency: an overview

The measurement of environmental efficiency and the identification of its determinants are important in order to evaluate existing environmental policies and design new policies. Since the end of the 1980s, a large and growing literature has developed on the application of frontier techniques - particularly Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) - to measuring environmental efficiency. We provide a brief introduction to this literature, highlighting the main approaches used and draw attention to some recent developments which provide openings for future research.