Abstract
For years, China has adopted environmental regulations in developing ports to improve their sustainability. Based on the data of Chinese ports from 2009 to 2018, this paper presents a data envelopment analysis model with subdividing input-output indicator weights and develops it further in two stages with the weight preference and the slacks-based measure, respectively. After assessing the sustainable development capability (SDC) of Chinese ports and their spatial correlation, it revealed that Chinese ports are clustered in several regions and their SDC has spilled over into their neighbors. Further study revealed the SDC is affected by environmental regulations in different ways: as a key measure among regulations to improve the SDC, voluntary regulation has a spatial spillover effect, but neither the mandatory regulation nor public media regulation can significantly improve the SDC. This suggests that the port authority should enact environmental regulations based on the port spatial difference and the port should expand its operation scale and market size and recruit more top talent, which is good for improving its productivity and reducing its carbon emissions.
Highlights
Ports are important infrastructures to support international trade
Construction of a port demands a lot of resources, and it has caused many environmental problems in China, which have alerted the Chinese government to be concerned with environmental protection measures in the sustainable development path
The spatial spillover effects of various environmental regulations (ERs) on the port’s Sustainable development capability (SDC) are discussed, which revealed the synergistic effects of various ERs on the port’s SDC and suggests that the port authority and port enterprises rethink the importance of ERs
Summary
The cargo volume through Chinese ports was 14.35 billion tons in 2018, ranking first in the world. Construction of a port demands a lot of resources, and it has caused many environmental problems in China, which have alerted the Chinese government to be concerned with environmental protection measures in the sustainable development path. Sustainable development capability (SDC) is a key indicator to assess regional development [3]. ERs have a wide influence on regional economic development, and the Porter Hypothesis is widely utilized to review the environment–competitiveness relationship [4]. Their relationship is so complicated that it is still not clear. When ports are located in different cities, their SDC will show some spatial features as well as their ERs, but few papers have investigated these
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