Measuring performance of road transportation industry in China in terms of integrated environmental efficiency in view of Streaming Data

Abstract

Road transportation industry not only promotes economic development, but also brings many environmental issues in China. It is necessary to evaluate the integrated environmental efficiency of road transportation industry, including carbon dioxide emissions, traffic accident and traffic noise which is a Steaming Data. In this study, a parallel DEA model with sub-system preference is proposed to measuring the integrated environmental efficiency of road transportation industry in 2013–2017 considering various undesirable outputs. Then, the convergence analysis approach is employed to investigate the regional differences in terms of efficiency of road transportation. The empirical results show that the overall integrated environmental efficiency underperformed nationwide, and the passenger transportation sub-system outperformed freight transportation when the latter is restricted in some hours. From a regional perspective, the efficiency performances show downward trends in areas eastern, central and western. The passenger transportation sub-system outperforms in eastern area and the freight transportation outperforms in central area. Furthermore, the convergence analysis results indicate that the integrated environmental efficiency in eastern and western areas not only converged to their own stable levels but also that the differences in the integrated environmental efficiency between eastern and western areas are condensing. The contributions of this study lie in not only proposing a parallel DEA model with sub-system preference and considering the streaming data, but also providing suggestions to improving the road transportation industry in terms of integrated environmental efficiency. Finally, the research limitations and further research directions were conducted.