Abstract
In recent decades, the high-speed development in China has caused serious air pollution in China. The present paper proposes a stochastic data envelopment analysis (DEA) model based on a general two-stage structure with comprehensively considering the randomness in both desirable and undesirable outputs to calculate the environmental efficiency of the industry system. The new proposed model is more applicable to practical system, and is applied to evaluate the performance of production and waste gas treatment in the industrial sector for China’s regions along the “One Belt and One Road” in 2015. The results show that about half of the regions along “One Belt and One Road” in China are inefficient, where the performance on waste gas treatment is significantly worse than that of industrial production. Further, the managers should take different strategies for efficiency improvement in different areas because of the obvious differences in efficiency scores, in which the regions in the southeast area should pay more attention to improving waste gas treatment efficiency while that in the northwest area need to focus on industrial production efficiency.
Highlights
China’s industry section has gained remarkable development during the past several decades, which has surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest industrial producer
The undesirable output in the first stage is considered as an intermediate output between the production stage and the pollution treatment stage
The present paper proposes a stochastic two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) model based on a general two-stage structure with considering the randomness on both desirable and undesirable variables based on both radial and non-radial forms
Summary
China’s industry section has gained remarkable development during the past several decades, which has surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest industrial producer. The environmental efficiency in China’s industry section cannot match its size. As China’s industrialization deepens, the problem of air pollution is gradually increasing, which has caused serious health problems in the whole country [1]. China has become the country with the most serious air pollution all around the world based on the results in “2016 Yale environmental performance index report”. China’s government has done a lot of work to release the air pollution by introducing some important laws and regulations, such as “Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan (2013)” and “The People’s Republic of China on the prevention and control of air pollution (2015)”. In the “China Thirteenth Five Year Plan (2016–2020)”, the Chinese government plan to significantly improve air quality. It is not easy to release air pollution problem of China’s areas in the context of high-speed economic development
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