Spatial Distribution and Factors Influencing Ecological Efficiency of the Yellow River Basin in China

Abstract

Improving urban ecological efficiency is an integral part of ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin. We used the super-efficiency slacks-based model with unexpected output to measure the ecological efficiency of 62 prefecture-level cities in the Yellow River Basin from 2005 to 2018. Its spatial distribution characteristics and convergence are discussed. The influencing factors and spatial spillovers of the ecological efficiency are assessed through the spatial Dubin model. The results show that: 1) The ecological efficiency is highest in cities in the lower reaches of the Yellow River Basin, mid-level in the upper reaches, and lowest in the middle reaches. 2) There is no σ convergence in the ecological efficiency of the Yellow River Basin, but there is absolute β convergence and conditional β convergence. 3) Economic development, financial development, and technological innovation significantly promote ecological efficiency, and the spatial spillover effects are significant. Increased connection with the outside world can significantly improve ecological efficiency, but there is no apparent spatial spillover effect for these connections. The industrial structure and urbanization rate reduced ecological efficiency and have a significant negative spillover effect. The energy consumption structure reduces the level of ecological efficiency, and the spillover effect is not significant.

Effect of Zero Growth of Fertilizer Action on Ecological Efficiency of Grain Production in China under the Background of Carbon Emission Reduction

“…The micro level mainly included the agricultural acreage, the scale of farmers [28], the characteristics of farmers, agricultural technology training [6], farmers' education years [29] and so on. At the macro level, it mainly included financial development [30], technological progress [31], GDP [32], agricultural informatization [33], farmland transfer [34], level of agricultural mechanization [35], urbanization level [36,37] and agricultural policy included smart agriculture, environmental regulation and lowcarbon trade pilot [38][39][40]. In terms of the zero growth of fertilizer action, existing studies included the driving factors of fertilizer reduction [39][40][41][42][43][44] and the contribution of fertilizer to agricultural pollution reduction [45][46][47].…”

Research on Industrial Ecological Efficiency Evaluation and Improvement Countermeasures Based on Data-Driven Evaluations from 30 Provinces and Cities in China

“…However, compared with the existing literature [51], the limitation of this paper is the lack of spillover analysis of the spatial effect of industrial ecological efficiency and analysis of external factors. A future research direction is to strengthen the spatial correlation and influencing factor analysis of industrial ecological efficiency.…”

Regional Differences and Convergence Characteristics of Urban Ecological Efficiency in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, China

“…Earlier studies have found that the dynamic evolution of UEE is vulnerable to regional economic development level, urbanization, industrial structure, population size, and traffic conditions (Ge et al, 2021;Guo et al, 2022)…”

“…However, at present, only a few studies have incorporated convergence analysis in the topic of UEE. In addition, most empirical studies tend to use the ordinary least squares (OLS) model (Guo et al, 2022;Zhang and Lu, 2022) to test convergence and divergence characteristics, which ignores the spatial spillover effect and makes it difficult to accurately grasp the convergence characteristics of UEE .…”