Abstract
Green development is an important way to meet the challenges of ecological and environmental protection and economic growth, as well as an inevitable choice to realize China’s sustainable development in the new era. The Chinese economic system is such that local government competition has become a key factor affecting regional green development under the current leadership. Based on the inter-provincial panel data of 30 provinces in mainland China from 1997 to 2017, this paper uses the total-factor non-radial directional distance function and slack-based measure data envelopment analysis (SBM-DEA) to measure the green development efficiency of the provinces. Additionally, it also uses the Malmquist–Luenberger (ML) index to decompose green development efficiency and analyzes its internal driving factors. Finally, taking environmental regulation as a mediating variable, this paper empirically analyzes the influence mechanism of local government competition on green development efficiency from three perspectives including growth competition, fiscal competition and investment competition. The study found that: the green development efficiency of Chinese regions showed a downward trend, with significant regional differences; technological progress is the key factor to improve the efficiency of green development, and its role gradually decreases from eastern to western and central regions; pure technical efficiency has become a bottleneck restricting the improvement of green development efficiency, while scale efficiency shows significant regional differences; the growth competition, fiscal competition and investment competition of local government all have a significant inhibitory effect on the efficiency of green development. This paper puts forward policy suggestions supporting enterprise technology research and development, optimizing energy conservation and emission reduction as well as improving the local government performance evaluation system for green development.
Highlights
Chinese urbanization and industrialization have experienced 40 years of reforms and opening up, and the level of urbanization reached 59.58% in 2018
The efficiency value remained above 0.5 in most years, and only fell below 0.5 in 2008–2010. This may be due to the impact of the financial crisis on China’s economy in 2008, and the gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate in 2008 fell to 10.1% from 14.7% in
This paper decomposes the green development efficiency into technical progress, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency based on the ML index method
Summary
Chinese urbanization and industrialization have experienced 40 years of reforms and opening up, and the level of urbanization reached 59.58% in 2018. Public Health 2020, 17, 3485; doi:10.3390/ijerph17103485 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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