Environmental Efficiency Evaluation And Its Applications Via Data Envelopment Analysis

Nowdays,the continuous exposure of environmental pollution has seriously restricted the social development of many countries,especially developing countries.With the acceleration of urbanization process,environmental pollution has become more and more serious.In the past 40 years,China's economy has achieved rapid development,but the high-speed economic growth mainly depended on high investment and high consumption at the cost of high pollution and low efficiency.However,this model of development leads to a contradiction between economic development and environmental protection.As a result,the deterioration of the environment is becoming more and more serious.After the review of the model and its long-term practice,people have realized the importance of environmental protection in the sustainable development of the economy of a country.Sustainable development cannot be realized without effective management of the environment.To achieve effective environmental management,we require scientific and objective environmental performance evaluation methods.In view of the above-mentioned context,this thesis investigates several environmental performance evaluation problems based on data envelopment analysis(DEA)and develops relevant evaluation methods that can be used in practice.The problems to be addressed in this thesis include:how to evaluate the environmental performance of systems with fuzzy number,how to measure the environmental performance in order to set the closest target for the environmental inefficient system using least efforts to achieve environmental efficient,how to measure the overall environmental efficiency and total factor energy efficiency of a complex two-stage system,and how to evaluate the dynamic change of environment performance of a parallel transportation network with regional heterogeneity.Based on the theoretical investigation of these problems,effective environmental performance evaluation methods are developed and applied to some practical problems in this thesis.This thesis is organized in seven chapters,and the main contents of the seven chapters are given as follows:The first chapter is the introduction.We first present the background(context)of this thesis and then provide a literature review on DEA,the basic method for our environmental performance evaluation.The problems studied in this thesis are then introduced.Finally,we give the main research contents and innovations of this thesis.The second chapter introduces the basic theory of DEA,including the basic concepts of DEA,the basic DEA models and some basic concepts in environmental efficiency evaluation.The third chapter is environmental efficiency evaluation for a single-stage system with the fuzzy number and its application.In this chapter,an integrated Enhanced Russell measure model is proposed based on data envelopment analysis for evaluating the performance of decision making units in the presence of undesirable outputs in fuzzy circumstance.Then,the new model is applied to analyze the environmental efficiency and provide the benchmarks for the thermal power firms in China,which can guide the decision makers to make suitable future production plans for improving their performance.The fourth chapter is the environmental efficiency evaluation for a single-stage system considering the path for performance improvement and its application.By considering undesirable outputs,a new closest target DEA model based on Range Adjusted Measure(RAM)is established to measure the environmental performance of the system.The proposed model is used to measure the environmental efficiency of regions in the Xiangjiang River Basin in China,and the closest targets are set for these inefficient regions so that they can make the least efforts to achieve efficient.The fifth chapter is the environmental efficiency evaluation of a two-stage system via total-factor energy efficiency and its application.With the rapid development of industry,the problems of growing energy consumption and environmental pollution in the industry are drawing increasing attention of the government and scholars.In this chapter,we divide the industrial system into two stages,i.e.,an energy utilization stage and a pollution treatment stage,for accurately evaluating the total-factor energy efficiency of the system as well as its overall environmental efficiency.We build a new two-stage data envelopment analysis model with shared inputs to analyze China's industry that was commonly considered as a "black box" in traditional environmental efficiency methods.Based on the theoretical analysis results of the model,some policy suggestions are given to this industry.The sixth chapter is the environmental efficiency evaluation of parallel transportation network considering regional heterogeneity and its application.In chapter 6,we examine China's transportation sector bv dividing it into four main subsystems:railway,highway,waterway,and civil aviation,and further build a network data envelopment analysis model for performance measurement of the sector with considering undesirable output-C02 emissions.Moreover,considering the heterogeneity of transportation sectors in different areas of China,a new metafrontier Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index is proposed based on the network DEA model,which is used to investigate the productivity growth of 30 regions' transportation sectors during 2007-2013.Finally,some suggestions are given for guiding the development of China's transportation sector.The seventh chapter concludes this thesis with prospects for future research.In this chapter,the main works of this thesis are first summarized,and the main contributions and possible improvements of this thesis are then outlined.Finally,some suggestions for future research directions are provided.