Identifying the most relevant peers for benchmarking waste management performance: A conditional directional distance Benefit-of-the-Doubt approach.

The paper demonstrates that the outcome of the robust and conditional directional distance version of the BoD model not only contains information on the overall efficiency score and rank, but also enables a region to identify its genuine peers, disentangle the overall effect of the background conditions on the performance and assess one's relative strengths and relative weakness vis-à-vis its most relevant peers when evaluating its municipal solid waste management. We illustrate how this information can be retrieved from the outcomes of DEA/BoD based efficiency and performance benchmarking studies by applying the methodology to the case of the Brussels Capital Region. The results show that Freiburg Hamburg and the province of Limburg are in general the most interesting peers for the Brussels Capital Region. In addition, the analysis reveals that Freiburg is identified as the most instructive peers if the region is interested in improving its composting and recycling rate.