Article

 

ENVIRONMENTAL INDICES FOR CEECs 
 
by
 
Dimitrios A. Giannias, University of Crete
Georgios A. Giannias, European Center for Economic and Technical Studies (EKOM)
 
JEL classification : O130, O180
 
Abstract
The development of environmental indices can be extremely useful just as indices of prices, unemployment, etc. The locational decisions of economic agents depend on various aspects of the environment and composite indices could provide the necessary information to economic agents. This paper develops a composite index which is offered for a comparative evaluation of the environment conditions in the former Eastern Europe and Greece, obtains rankings based on the values of the environmental indices, and investigates the meaning of the composite index in terms of microeconomics. An analysis of consumer behaviour that the indices should be weighted by a set of weights that is hold constant across regions. The analysis indicates that according to our index criterion among the Central and East European countries and Greece, Czechoslovakia is on the top of the ranking followed by Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Greece, and Albania.