Abstract
With the acceleration of industrialization, a large amount of energy consumption has brought tremendous pressure to the natural environment. In order to prevent environmental pollution and promote sustainable development, the environmental efficiency assessment as an effective way to provide decision-making basis has been given wide attention. This study measures the environmental efficiency of 30 provinces in China from 2006 to 2015 based on the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) environmental assessment radial model both under natural disposability and managerial disposability that considered the constant variable return to scale (RTS) and the damage to scale (DTS). In addition, the scale efficiency under the two kinds of disposability of China’s 30 provinces were also measured. We found that the environmental efficiencies of different provinces in China showed regional disparities. Provinces such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong had a good performance in unified environmental efficiency and scale efficiency both under natural disposability and managerial disposability. Generally speaking, the eastern regions always performed better than the central and western regions in unified environmental efficiency during the observed years. Therefore, policies should be established to distribute the resources in balance between the east, center, and west to further promote environmental efficiency.
Highlights
In recent years, remarkable achievements have been achieved in the development of China’s economy
Natural disposability: this concept indicates that a Decision Making Unit (DMU) is devoted to decrease the undesirable outputs by reducing the inputs
Perspective, scale efficiency under managerial disposability was more balanced than that under natural disposability, and the SEN was lower than the SEM on average in 2006, while the SEN was higher than the SEM in 2015
Summary
Remarkable achievements have been achieved in the development of China’s economy. More and more scholars have applied DEA methods to evaluate the efficiencies of energy and the environment in different fields and regions. Zhou and Ang [7] first took carbon dioxide as a kind of undesirable output and applied the DEA method to estimate the efficiency of 21 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Wang et al [13] applied the RAM-DEA model to measure the integrated efficiency of energy and the environment under two kinds of disposability for China’s 30 regions from 2006 to 2010. In the conditions of natural disposability and managerial disposability, the unified environmental efficiency and scale efficiency of 30 regions in China from 2006 to 2015 were evaluated and analyzed.
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