Study Of Environmental Technical Efficiency And Influencing Factors In Chinese Prefecture-Level Cities

Since the reform and opening up,China's economy has achieved rapid and world-renowned development.However,the economic growth of China still depends on scale extension,high energy consumption,high pollution,and high emissions,at the expense of the environment.In the long run,it will damage the living environment of future generations.With the development of the economy and the improvement of people's living standard,the requirements for the environment have also increased,and the Chinese government has paid more and more attention to environmental issues and incorporated these issues into the assessment system.A reasonable measurement of environmental technical efficiency and an future analysis of its influencing factors are the prerequisites for making effective environmental policies.Therefore,the research of this article has important theoretical and practical implications.This paper first builds an environmental productivity assessment model based on the multiple input and multiple output model and the directional distance function.Then,we estimate the environmental technical efficiency of sulfur dioxide emissions as well as the emission reduction potential of China,based on a citylevel panel dataset covering the period 2011-2015.Based on the environmental technical efficiency measurement,the influencing factors of the random effect panel Tobit model are used.Morever,the cities are further divided into subgroups,i.e.eastern,central and western region cities,"Two-Control area" and non "Two-Control area" cities,resource-based and non resource-based cities.These subgroups analyses can provide more reliable results and better policy making supports.The results of this study show that(1)The top three cities in China for environmental technical efficiency are Shenzhen Guangdong,Changsha Hunan,and Daqing Heilongjiang;the last three cities are located in Guangdong Province,namely Zhuhai,Foshan and Dongguan;under the existing technology level,cities across the country can increase GDP by 16.66% and reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by 51.72% through the rational allocation of resources.(2)From the overall national level,There is a U-shaped curve relationship between the environmental technical efficiency of urban emissions in China and the logarithm of GDP per capita.Due to the increasing nature of the logarithmic function,there may also be a U-shaped curve relationship with GDP per capita.There is also a positive relationship between environmental technical efficiency and population density.(3)Judging from the analysis of location factors,the "TwoControl area" and non "Two-Control area" cities,resource-based and non resource-based cities,and resource-based cities are further divided into growth-type cities,mature-type cities,declining-type cities,and renewable-type cities.The influencing factors of these types of cities are different.