Abstract This is the first study on green growth (GG) efficiency from a global perspective (115 countries from 1996 to 2018) that considers natural depletions, alongside CO 2 emissions, as undesirable outputs of the GG efficiency estimation in the first stage. More importantly, by examining different ways to treat those undesirable outputs and in combination with the double bootstrap slack-based measure data envelopment analysis approach in the second stage, we found that the models that use the reciprocal values of the undesirable outputs have higher explanatory power than the others. Consequently, in the third stage, we examine the GG efficiency and productivity change over time of the sampled countries using the model with reciprocal values. The study finds that countries with better governance quality, among other factors, can positively improve their green growth efficiency.
Ngo et al. (2026) studied this question.