Abstract
The European Green Deal and similar strategies seek to improve sustainability of the
agricultural sector via public support programmes. It is important to assess the costs
of sustainable energy use in agriculture by exploiting the shadow price approach.
However, the earlier literature often ignored the fact that shadow price analysis may
be sensitive to the assumed direction of optimization. This paper seeks to disentangle
the major patterns in energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emission performance
in the selected European Union countries by assuming different optimization
directions. The country-level data are used to construct the environmental production
technology by means of the data envelopment analysis. The different directional
output distance functions (aggregate, unit and radial) for the weak disposability data
envelopment analysis models are used to quantify the shadow prices of the energyrelevant GHG emission and construct the marginal abatement cost curves. The
results indicate spatial and temporal variation in the environmental performance that
can be addressed by adjusting the support programmes.
Štreimikis, J.; Shen, Z.Y.; Baležentis, T. 2023. Does the energy‑related greenhouse gas emission abatement cost depend on the optimization direction: shadow pricing based on the weak disposability technology in the European Union agriculture. Central European journal of operations research : Springer. ISSN 1435-246X. eISSN 1613-9178. p. 1–27. DOI: 10.1007/s10100-023-00866-0. [Scopus; Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science)].