How to Build a Sustainable Productivity Index

Le résumé fourni par la source

Sustainable production requires that firms produce good outputs in ways that minimise the use of natural capital (e.g. soil and water resources) and the production of bad outputs (e.g. heavy metals, non-biodegradable plastics, greenhouse gases). Statisticians are increasingly being asked to measure changes in productivity in ways that will reflect well on firms that adopt sustainable production practices. This paper describes a method for building a so-called sustainable productivity index (SPI). This necessarily involves assigning weights to different inputs and outputs. I assign these weights in such a way that the index satisfies basic axioms from index theory (e.g. identity, transitivity). I illustrate the properties of different indexes using an artificial (or ‘toy’) data set. I discuss ways in which statisticians can assess the sensitivity of index numbers to the choice of weights. Finally, to illustrate the methodology, I compute SPI numbers for sixteen sectors of the Australian economy.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.