Measuring and Evaluating Air Pollution Per Inhabitant: A Statistical Approach

Abstract

This paper examines Europe Union member countries air pollution per inhabitant, using a novel statistical approach -I- distance method. The issue is measuring the air pollution per inhabitant and evaluating this measurement by ranking countries. Ranking has been based on six different criteria chosen to determine countries' air pollution. We have found that the worst situation occurs in Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Ireland, Estonia, and Greece, while situation in Sweden, Portugal, Germany, Slovakia, and United Kingdom is much better with far less air pollution per inhabitant. The paper also seeks to explain the results of ranking, which came as a result of this research and abilities of specific countries to cope with the environmental problems such as air pollution. The main contributions of this paper are defining the measurement of the air pollution per inhabitant, which includes the whole set of input parameters, and discovering which of these parameters were crucial for ranking of countries.