Environmental Efficiency Analysis of Urban Agglomerations in China: A Non-Parametric Meta-Frontier Approach

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the environmental efficiency of Chinese urban agglomerations (UAs) based on a non-parametric meta-frontier approach. We find most of UAs has a large gap and imbalance of environmental performance under meta-frontier. The meta-efficiencies of eastern and southern coastal areas are better than that of middle and western. Besides, the efficiency difference of cities in each UA is relatively small, which may be caused by the technology spillover effect. In addition, the average technology gap among most UAs exists but not so huge. Based on the findings, we provide specific suggestions for Chinese central and local governments.

KEY WORDS:

• Data envelopment analysis
• efficiency analysis
• environmental efficiency
• non-parametric meta-frontier
• Urban agglomeration

Acknowledgments

The authors thank editor Ali Kutan and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The authors are grateful to Professor Joe Zhu for his suggestions and comments on earlier versions of the paper.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant (Nos. 71801068, 71701060, 71871081, 71471053, 71701059, 71801075 and 71828101), the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant number 18ZDA064), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant (Nos. JZ2018HGBZ0174, S2017HGXJ0028 and JZ2016HGBZ0996).