Environmental Efficiency and Technological Readiness. an Evidence from EU-28

Nowadays, the concept of sustainable development is a fundamental pillar and an important challenge for growth and progress for developed countries. For the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), the environmental efficiency can be determined as the set of activities that satisfies the human requirements and that provides quality of life at the same time the environmental impacts are minimized progressively. It is clear that the environmental efficiency is a key variable for the sustainable development, but there is any variable influencing directly this efficiency? In this work it has been found that the technological readiness is an important factor influencing the environmental efficiency. For EU, the environmental efficiency is related to technology so that the technological readiness explains part of environmental efficiency but it is not a determinant factor. This means, a high technological readiness index implies a high efficiency scores but not viceversa. It will be used the Data Envelopment Analysis methodology to obtain the efficiency scores, and the technological readiness index developed by The World Economic Forum. Once the data are obtained, a regression model is applied to further study the relation between both.