Energy-Environmental Efficiency and Effective Factors in Oil-Rich Countries

Nowadays, economic growth is one of the most prominent objectives of most economic policies, but an objective which usually results in environmental degradation. Economic growth and development require the use of energy as one of the most important inputs of production, and inaccessibility of affordable and reliable energy sources has frequently led to economic and social retrogression in many parts of the world. The main objective of this paper is to measure energy-environmental efficiency for Iran and oil-rich countries using the Data Envelopment Analysis method with undesirable outputs and to investigate factors affecting it using the panel Tobit regression method. The results show that Iran’s average energy-environmental efficiency under constant and variable returns to scale are 50 and 54 percent, respectively. This means that it has the lowest energy-environmental efficiency compared  to other studied countries. Also, there is a significant and negative relationship between the use of fossil fuels and population with energy-environmental efficiency, whereas there is a significant and positive relationship between the extent of trade openness and energy-environmental efficiency. Accordingly, this study proposes some executive strategy and recommendations for increasing energy-environmental efficiency