The purpose of this work is to develop an approach to assess the effectiveness of the environmental management
systems of the regions of the Russian Federation. The effectiveness of EMS in this study is proposed to be
understood in a purely economic sense: as the ratio of the indicator characterizing the improvement of the
environmental aspects of the region's economy to the costs incurred to achieve this improvement over a period of
time. The study contributes to the literature in several areas: 1) an approach has been proposed for defining a
regional environmental management system as an aggregate of regional institutions that manage budgetary and
extrabudgetary funds for environmental protection; 2) a method was proposed for evaluating the effectiveness of
regional EMS based on the use of DEA models with negative outputs; 3) an evaluation of the effectiveness of the
EMS regions of the European part of Russia was carried out, effective and inefficient regions were identified, the
amounts of funds spent inefficiently were determined; 4) the hypothesis was verified that the size of the region's
economy (assessed by GRP volume and population size) affects the efficiency of the EMS, and this effect is negative