Abstract
The economy in China has gradually transformed from a stage of high-speed development into one of high-quality development. The current study considers the economic environment, energy saving, and pollution treatment in an integrated way to measure eco-efficiency and external environmental heterogeneity. A modified three-phase data envelopment analysis (DEA) model is constructed to measure ecological efficiency while eliminating interference from both statistical noise and the external environment. The first phase uses a two-stage production structure DEA model considering nondiscretionary input and undesirable output. The model was applied to data for the year 2015 in 30 administrative regions in China, including municipalities, provinces, and autonomous regions. The results of this study show that many factors influence these regions’ eco-efficiency in China, including the levels of economic development, technological innovation, environmental regulation, and industrial structure. Finally, implications and suggestions are given to provincial governments from the perspectives of different industries and of provincial ecological–economic development.
Highlights
China’s social economy has developed rapidly since the country’s reform and opening in 1979, development which depends excessively on the inputs of energy and resources, and the expansion of production scale [1]
Since urbanization can influence the input of resource utilization in different ways, we should test the influence of urbanization on resource utilization, and we develop the hypothesis below: Hypothesis 2 (H2)
A three-phase data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach is applied to calculate the eco-efficiency of 30 Chinese provinces in order to evaluate their green growth
Summary
China’s social economy has developed rapidly since the country’s reform and opening in 1979, development which depends excessively on the inputs of energy and resources, and the expansion of production scale [1]. In 2019, the total energy consumption reached 4.86 billion tons of standard coal in China, and the annual average growth rate of energy consumption rose 3.39% between 2010 and 2019 [2]. The SO2 emission is falling at an average rate of 11% a year, the investment in environmental governance is growing at an annual average rate of 3.58% and has reached RMB 953.9 billion Yuan (USD 138.2 billion) [2,4]. This combination of excessive energy consumption and huge waste discharge is forcing China to address energy conservation and pollution treatment [5]
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