Environmental Assessment on Energy and Sustainability by Data Envelopment Analysis

3HISTORY

3.1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter¹ discusses the mathematical linkage among L1 regression, goal programming (GP) and DEA. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the purpose of this book is to discuss how to prepare a use of DEA environmental assessment, not a conventional use of DEA itself. However, it is true that this book cannot exist without previous research efforts on DEA. In particular, this chapter needs to mention that all the methodological descriptions in this book are due to the efforts of Professor William W. Cooper who was a father of DEA. See Figure 1.2. It is easily envisioned in the figure that the description in this chapter will be further extendable to DEA in Section I and DEA environmental assessment in Section II.

Before starting this chapter, it is necessary for us to describe two concerns. One of the two concerns is that the contribution of Professor Cooper in economics and accounting can be summarized, in short, as the conceptual development of “social economics” and “social accounting,”² based upon which he developed DEA³ for performance assessment of organizations in a public sector. This book will extend his two concepts (i.e., social economics and social accounting) to the development of “social sustainability” for a public sector, further connecting to “corporate sustainability” for a private sector. The other concern is that many DEA researchers believe that DEA originated from the ratio form, or Model (2.2). However, we disagree with such a view on the origin ...