School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, People's Republic of China.
Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2022 Jan;29(3):4722-4735. doi: 10.1007/s11356-021-15790-6. Epub 2021 Aug 19.
This study investigates economic convergence and sustainable development in Africa. By introducing an aggregate production technology and directional distance function, it examines the productivity growth of 28 African economies from 1990 to 2019. The proposed approach considers all decision-making units (countries) as a whole, and the productivity gains are then estimated under a nonparametric framework. In the empirical analysis, the carbon emissions are included in the Luenberger productivity measurement, called green productivity. The results show that the annual average growth rate of green productivity is 1.51% in African, and different types of club convergence for green productivity indicator and its decomposition are observed during the sample period. The decomposition of the Luenberger indicator shows that green African growth is mainly driven by technological progress, not efficiency change. Furthermore, the overall inefficiency is decomposed into technical and structural effects. The latter measure the potential improvement in terms of resource reallocation. Structural inefficiency is larger than technical inefficiency, suggesting that African countries could improve their economic and environmental performances by optimizing input/output mixes.
本研究考察了非洲的经济收敛和可持续发展。通过引入综合生产技术和方向距离函数，本文考察了 1990 年至 2019 年 28 个非洲经济体的生产力增长。所提出的方法将所有决策单元（国家）视为一个整体，然后在非参数框架下估计生产力增长。在实证分析中，将碳排放纳入 Luenberger 生产力测度中，称为绿色生产力。结果表明，非洲的绿色生产力年平均增长率为 1.51%，在样本期间观察到绿色生产力指标及其分解的不同类型俱乐部收敛。Luenberger 指标的分解表明，绿色非洲的增长主要是由技术进步驱动的，而不是效率变化。此外，整体无效率被分解为技术和结构效应。后者衡量资源重新配置方面的潜在改进。结构无效率大于技术无效率，表明非洲国家可以通过优化投入/产出组合来提高经济和环境绩效。
