Evaluating 22 EU member states’ ‘waste culture’ using Hofstede’s and Schwartz’s cultural dimensions

ABSTRACT

The issue of municipal solid waste (MSW) arisings has received great attention recently since it is not only a by-product of economic activity but also serves as an input to the economy through material or energy recovery. The main focus of this study is cultural formation and especially the current picture of waste culture and public perception across European Union (EU) member states. Thus, this study will first evaluate environmental efficiency with data envelopment analysis (DEA) based on five parameters: waste, gross domestic product (GDP), labour, capital, and population density for 22 EU Member States and for the years 2005, 2010 and 2015 in order to evaluate which Member States are more efficient. Then the efficiency results are contrasted to Hofstede’s and Schwartz’s cultural dimensions on STATA with the use of regression modelling. Results show that for year 2005 no significant relationship is noticed for both cultural models, whereas for years 2010 and 2015 there appears to be a significant connection. The above-mentioned findings can be associated with the financial crisis that has hit Europe after 2008 making people more sceptical, while EU legislations have laid out some important directives in the field of waste management. Finally, along with the factors above, EU has faced severe environmental challenges due to waste arisings, as well as accidents and injuries for people working in this sector, which in turn have widely modified EU’s waste culture as supported by this study’s results.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental efficiency
• waste culture
• Hofstede
• Schwartz
• Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)
• environmental policy
• regression analysis
• cultural dimensions

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Editor-in-Chief Professor Jingzhu Zhao and the anonymous reviewers for the helpful and constructive comments on an earlier draft of our paper. Any remaining errors are solely the authors’ responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In cases where data were not available for a variable for the specific years chosen, the data from the previous year were used.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the General Secretariat for Research and Technology and the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI).