This study introduces the measurement of environmental inefficiency from an economic perspective. We develop our proposal using the latest by-production models that consider two separate and parallel technologies: a standard technology generating good outputs, and a polluting technology for the by-production of bad outputs. While research into environmental inefficiency incorporating undesirable or bad outputs from a technological perspective is well established, no significant attempts have been made to extend it to the economic sphere. Based on the definition of net profits, we develop an economic inefficiency measure that accounts for suboptimal behavior in the form of foregone private revenue and environmental cost excess. We show that economic inefficiency can be consistently decomposed according to technical and allocative criteria, considering the two separate technologies and market prices, respectively. We illustrate the empirical implementation of our approach using a dataset on agriculture at the level of US states.

这项研究从经济学的角度介绍了对环境效率低下的衡量。我们使用最新的副产品模型制定提案，该模型考虑了两种独立且并行的技术：产生良好产出的标准技术和用于副产出不良产出的污染技术。尽管从技术角度对掺入不良或不良产出的环境效率低下的研究已经很成熟，但仍未进行重大尝试将其扩展到经济领域。基于净利润的定义，我们开发了一种经济效率低下的措施，以已放弃的私人收入和环境成本过剩的形式解释了次优的行为。我们证明，可以根据技术和分配标准来持续分解经济效率低下的情况，分别考虑两种独立的技术和市场价格。我们使用美国各州的农业数据集说明了我们方法的实证实施。