Measuring and explaining government performance for developing solar electricity market

This paper evaluates the productivity of worldwide countries for developing solar electricity market by addressing the following questions: (1) to what extent should governments further decrease their supports while maintaining the electricity utilization at the current level? And (2) to what extent should governments increase the production of solar electricity generation and decrease the emission of CO₂ air simultaneously? To comprehensively address both questions to improve energy utilization efficiencies, those of countries are evaluated by using Non-Separable DEA model (DEA measure with non-separable desirable and undesirable outputs for evaluating efficiency). This case study of 25 solar-development countries with the panel data covering the period of 2009-2012 reveals that pure technical efficiency of developing countries is slightly more efficient, on average, than that of developed countries. However, the total efficiency of developed countries does appear to be significantly more efficient than that of developing countries. Besides, the results of this paper point that inefficient countries could reduce their total expenditure and investment, days for getting electricity, total electricity generation and CO₂ emission in a given output and/or increase their proportion of solar electricity based on a constant input respectively to become efficient countries among their peer groups.