Читать книгу The Political Economy of the BRICS Countries - Группа авторов - Страница 64

This section draws on the results obtained by Santana et al. (2014) in a study done on the BRICS nations. The study is based on real data from 2000 to 2007 using the Data Envelope Analysis (DEA) technique. The study measured the efficiency of economic, environmental, and social processes where inputs considered were gross fixed capital formation, expenditures on research and development, and employed population. The outputs considered were GDP for economic efficiency, carbon emissions for environmental efficiency, and life expectancy at birth for social efficiency.

The following table shows the mean total efficiency results, according to each country. The higher the number, the more efficient is the process.

If one considers the ranks, and the sum of ranks, we get the following:

There are a few obvious features of the results that emerge. The countries considered within the block called BRICS are quite heterogeneous, not only in terms of geo-political and other socio-cultural features but also in terms of economic, environmental, and social efficiencies. Overall, Brazil is the best performer given the lowest sum of ranks. India followed closely by China, being the giants in the group, are significantly less efficient that Brazil or South Africa. If we go by environmental efficiency alone, then again Brazil and South Africa perform better than the others, and China is by far the worst.