Towards a culture of environmental efficiency: An application of conditional partial nonparametric frontiers

Due to the fact that norms govern individual behavior, which in turn it is related to the environmental behaviour, this study tries to establish a link between human behavior (in terms of cultural values) and the environment. With the use of robust frontiers this paper constructs countries’ environmental efficiency ratios. Then it conditions these ratios with countries’ cultural values in order to capture their effect on the calculated environmental efficiency measures. The empirical results of the conditional and unconditional robust nonparametric frontiers of a sample of 17 OECD countries (for the census years of 1980, 1990 and 2000) reveal that countries’ national culture values have changed over the years from a neutral posture towards the enhancement of countries’ environmental efficiency. In addition, the results indicate that there is still much work to be done from countries’ environmental policy makers for the enhancement of an efficient environmental culture.