Abstract
Although road transport plays a vital role in promoting the development of China’s national economy, it also produces much harmful output in the process of road transport. Various types of harmful output generate high social costs. In order to improve efficiency and protect the environment at the same time, a variety of undesirable outputs need to be considered when evaluating the environmental efficiency of road transport. In this paper, the performance of the road transport systems in 30 regions of China is evaluated considering multiple harmful outputs (noise, carbon emission, direct property losses), by employing the directional distance function. Further, a convergence analysis of the environmental efficiency of road transport is carried out. The empirical results show that the environmental efficiency of overall road transport in China increased from 0.8851 to 0.9633 from 2010 to 2017. Moreover, the environmental efficiency gaps between the eastern, central and western areas have narrowed over time, but still exist. Additionally, the results of σ convergence analysis show that convergence of environmental efficiency exists in the whole country and the western area, while only weak convergence exists in the eastern and central areas. Both absolute β convergence and conditional β convergence exist in the eastern, central and western areas. While the environmental efficiency improved over the study period, the environmental efficiencies of road transport in some provinces remain inefficient, which deserves more attention from those seeking to improve environmental efficiency. The paper concludes with suggestions for improving the environmental efficiency of road transport.
Highlights
Road transport is an indispensable part of China’s comprehensive transport system and plays a crucial role in promoting regional economic development and logistics operation [1,2]
The environmental efficiency gaps between the eastern, central and western areas have narrowed over time, but still exist
The directional distance function (DDF) model explained above was used to evaluate the environmental efficiency of road transport in 30 regions of China from 2010 to 2017, and MATLAB software was used for computing the optimal solution β * in the model
Summary
Road transport is an indispensable part of China’s comprehensive transport system and plays a crucial role in promoting regional economic development and logistics operation [1,2]. By the end of November 2019, China’s fixed-asset investment in roads reached 2024.214 billion yuan, up 1.9% from the same period in 2018 [3]. With the steady growth of market investment, the highway mileage of China’s road transport is increasing every year. The length of China’s road transport reached 4.8465 million kilometers in 2018, an increase of 73,000 km compared with 2017 [4]. China’s road freight market still occupies the largest proportion in the whole freight market. By November 2019, China’s freight volume had reached 486.31 million tons, with China’s road freight volume the largest, at 77.81 percent [3]
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