Research On Energy Efficiency Of China's Coastal Areas From Air Emissions Perspective:Data Envelopment Analysis

In recent years,the rapid development of China's economy has caused increasingly prominent environmental issues as China's economic growth has high cost in terms of energy consumption and pollution.China has received huge pressure on energy conservation and emissions reduction since China has been the largest consumer of energy consumption,as well as the largest emitter of carbon dioxide?CO₂?,sulfur dioxide?SO₂?and nitrogen oxide?NOX?over the world.Improving energy efficiency is recognized as the most effective way to reduce emissions and achieve sustainable development.Under the theoretical basis of data envelopment analysis?DEA?and global benchmark technology,this paper analyzed the energy efficiency of 12 provinces and municipalities in coastal areas of China from 2000 to 2014.Carbon dioxide,sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions are regarded as undesirable outputs.In this paper,the proposed global Epsilon-based measure?EBM-G?model is employed to estimate the static energy efficiency of coastal areas.We find that the level of economic development is positively related to energy efficiency.Besides,Circum-Bohai Sea Economic Region has the highest emission reduction potential in these three kinds of air emission.The global Malmquist-Luenberger?GML?productivity index based on directional distance function is used to evaluate dynamically the energy efficiency of the areas with panel data.It is demonstrated that technological progress is the main factor to promote energy efficiency in coastal areas,while the scale efficiency and management level are two main obstacles.Then,we compare the non-radial and radial global bounded adjusted measure?BAM-G?models with additive structure.The results confirm that the radial model overestimate energy efficiency.The joint efficiency estimated by BAM-G model can be decomposed into production efficiency and environmental efficiency.The production efficiency of coastal areas has been at a high level during the study period.And their environmental efficiency has improved significantly from 2000 to 2014,while the gap between regions gets larger.In order to discuss the efficient five provinces?Beijing,Shanghai,Guangdong,Fujian and Liaoning?,we construct the BAM-VF-G model based on the virtual frontier,and find that Shanghai has been in the leading position.Finally,we utilize kernel density estimation to describe the dynamic evolution of joint efficiency during the sample period.The results show a rising trend of the joint efficiency over time,while expanding gap exists between high efficiency regions and low efficiency areas.Based on the above analysis,this paper puts forward some suggestions to improve the energy efficiency of coastal areas.Firstly,the government needs to accelerate the upgrading of energy structure by decreasing the proportion of coal energy and increasing the proportion of clean energy,respectively.On the whole,it can reduce the air emissions from the source.Secondly,it is also necessary to differentiate energy efficiency policies between high efficiency regions and low efficiency areas.For instant,government should assign added emission reduction targets to Circum-Bohai Sea Economic Region which has the larger emission reduction potential.Thirdly,increase the technological progress to improve the overall energy efficiency and promote the efficient frontier constructed by Beijing,Shanghai,Guangdong,Fujian and Liaoning.And lastly,for enterprises,government can implement some measures such as the preferential tax policies,the sewage charges,energy performance contracting and carbon trading to promote energy efficiency and reduce emissions.