China's regional sustainability and diversified resource allocation: DEA environmental assessment on economic development and air pollution

Self Cite

Natural and managerial disposability are two important strategic concepts, whose priorities are economic prosperity and environmental protection, respectively. This study defines social sustainability as the simultaneous achievement of economic prosperity and environmental protection, and then assesses the degree of social sustainability across provinces in China. In addition, this study combines the concepts of natural and managerial disposability with Data Envelopment Analysis window analysis. The method allows for frontier shifts among different time periods and thus can provide more stable and reliable results. This method is applied to assess the energy and environmental performances across the provinces of China during [2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008][2009][2010][2011][2012][2013][2014], and provides detailed information about provincial variations, which are valuable and important to policy makers (especially for those in local governments). This study identifies three important findings. First, there were no significant improvements in China's environmental performance during the analysis periods, since, historically, the governments have not paid enough attention to environmental protection. Second, there are increasing trends in the provincial gaps regarding the environmental performance. In this regard, the central government should help the poor provinces to protect the environment. Third, there are significant differences between the results obtained under natural disposability and those obtained under managerial disposability, since they have different priorities regarding the operational and the environmental performances. Thus, significant contributions can be made by eco-technology progress combined with managerial performance improvements by business leaders and policy makers. This can be a new policy direction for the Chinese government.

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Sustainability of Provinces in China: A Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Window Analysis under the Concepts of Natural and Managerial Disposability

Sueyoshi

Yuan

et al. 2017

Self Cite

“…The first group of concepts (weak and strong disposability) were initially put forward by [57], and now these concepts has been dominant in the existing studies. The second group of concepts was put forward by Sueyoshi and his associates, such as [8,9,11,12,27,45,56,[58][59][60][61][62][63][64]. It is noteworthy that these two groups of disposability concepts do not conflict with each other, since weak disposability can become a special case of natural disposability.…”

Section: The Production Technology Set and The Disposability Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Sustainability Assessment across Provinces in China: An Analysis of Combining Intermediate Approach with Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Window Analysis

Zhang

Gao

2018

There are two categories (i.e., radial and non-radial category) in conventional DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis). Recently, intermediate approach was put forward as a new third category. Intermediate approach is a newly proposed approach and there are quite limited related studies. This study contributes to the DEA studies by putting forward an analytical framework of combining intermediate approach and DEA window analysis along with the concepts of natural and managerial disposability. Such combination is quite meaningful and this new approach has three important features. To the best of our knowledge, such type of research has never been investigated by the existing studies. As an application, this approach is used to evaluate the performance of provinces in China from 2007 to 2014. Furthermore, this study develops a series of performance indices from different perspectives. This study identifies the three important findings. Firstly, eco-technology advancements can achieve economic prosperity and environmental protection simultaneously, and thus should become a new direction of climate policies. Secondly, considerable differences exist in a series of indices that evaluates the performance of various provinces and pollutants from different respective. Then, sufficient attention should be given to the provinces and the pollutants with poor performance. Finally, the Chinese government should promote efficiency improvement by "catching up" for provinces with poor performance in the short term. In addition, the central government should reduce regional disparity in order to promote the social sustainability in the long term.

“…Bi et al (2015) [14] employed a SBM-DEA-based environmental efficiency index to probe 30 provinces' environmental performance in Chinese industry during 2001-2009. Similar to Wang et al (2013c) [11], Sueyoshi and Yuan (2015) [15] incorporated the natural disposability and managerial disposability to measure the China's provincial performance.…”

Section: Literature Review: China's Regional Environmental Efficiencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Does the Central Government’s Environmental Policy Work? Evidence from the Provincial-Level Environment Efficiency in China

Xia

et al. 2016

This paper aims at checking the effectiveness of environmental policy pushed by the Central Government at provincial level since China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). For this purpose, the industrial system of each province is divided into industrial production sub-system and pollution treatment sub-system, and a novel slack-based measure data envelopment analysis (SBM-DEA) model with non-cooperative game is proposed to evaluate the environment efficiency of both industrial production sub-system and pollutant treatment sub-system. The results show that the proposed model can describe the environmental efficiency more precisely than the traditional DEA models. During 2003-2012, the efficiencies of industrial production sub-system and pollution treatment sub-system at the provincial level are both relatively low. Specifically, the efficiency of industrial production is not only lower than pollution treatment efficiency, but is falling generally, especially in the Eastern area. However, in the Central and Western area, the efficiency of industrial production remains relatively stable, and pollution treatment efficiency is rising steadily. The technology gap between the Central/Western area and the Eastern area is narrowing, particularly concerning pollution treatment technology. We thus conclude that though the Central Government's environmental policies fail to solve the inner contradiction between economic and environmental systems, and they indirectly contribute to the expansion of pollutant treatment technology among the Eastern, Central, and Western areas, which is conducive to the coordinated development among different areas.