Abstract
The assessment of green productivity not only establishes the production ability but also involves economic, environmental, and social aspects which are the ultimate goals in achieving the sustainability. In this context, unlike the majority of previous literature, we have simultaneously considered the environmental and safety aspects to measure the static and dynamic evolution of green productivity to achieve a safe, eco-friendly, and sustainable development of the regional transport sector in South Asia. First, we proposed the super-efficiency ray-slack–based measure model with undesirable output to assess the static efficiency, which can effectively characterize weak and strong disposability relationship between desirable and undesirable outputs. Second, the biennial Malmquist-Luenberger index has been adopted to examine the dynamic efficiency, which can overcome recalculation issue once an additional time period is included in the data. Therefore, the proposed methodology provides more comprehensive, robust, and reliable insight in comparison to the conventional models. The results indicate (i) both static and dynamic efficiencies decreased during 2000–2019, implying that the transport sector in South Asia follows an unsustainable green development path at the regional level; (ii) dynamic efficiency was primarily held back by green technological innovation whereas green technical efficiency had a modest positive contribution. The policy implications suggest effective ways to improve green productivity of the transport sector in South Asia by promoting coordinated development among the transport structure, environmental and safety aspects, strengthening advance and innovative production technologies, endorsing green transportation practices, and implementing safety regulations and emission standards for the sustainable transport sector.
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The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 72271026, 72293601, 71871022), the Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation (grant number 161076), the Joint Development Program of Beijing Municipal Commission of Education, and the National Program for Support of Top-notch Young Professionals.
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All the authors contributed to the study’s conception and design. Methodology, data curation, writing — original draft preparation, software and formal analysis: Salman Hamid. Software and formal analysis: Qingqing Wang. Conceptualization, supervision, writing — review and editing, funding acquisition: Ke Wang. All the authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Highlights
• Green productivity of the transport sector in South Asia was evaluated from multiple perspectives.
• Static efficiency was measured by super-efficiency ray-slack–based measure with CO2 emissions and traffic casualties.
• Dynamic productivity was assessed by biennial Malmquist-Luenberger index.
• Static efficiency and dynamic productivity decreased during 2000–2019.
• Dynamic productivity was held back by technological innovation.
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Hamid, S., Wang, Q. & Wang, K. Evaluating green productivity of the regional transport sector in South Asia considering environmental and safety constraints: the evolution from static and dynamic perspectives. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 50969–50985 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-25865-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-25865-1