Green productivity and undesirable outputs in agriculture: a systematic review of DEA approach and policy recommendations

Abstract

Measuring efficiency in the presence of undesirable outputs could be difficult depending on how to treat these outputs; thus, undesirable outputs modelling has been an exciting subject of several studies in the Data envelopment analysis (DEA) literature in the last two decades. The present study aims to illustrate a thorough overlook of studies in which DEA has applied for measuring efficiency with undesirable outputs. Fifty-eight articles were published from 2000 to 2020 have been systematically reviewed through PRISMA protocol. The results indicated that "Journal of Cleaner Production" ranked first with six published articles, and Chinese scholars have the most contributions to this field, with twenty-third articles. Also, almost a quarter of the published articles' scope was related to agricultural pollution, and thirteen articles were published in 2016, the highest number of published articles annually. Taken together, the theoretical and empirical implications of research in the field of Green Productivity are discussed, and some policies were recommended.