Research On China's Regional Green Productivity Index Measurement

Total factor productivity,as the engine of economic development and the driving force of sustainable development,has been highly valued by the government.At the same time,the total factor productivity index is an effective tool to test the quality of economic development and the effect of policy implementation in a country or a region,and the research about it is constantly evolving and evolving.Today,with the scarcity of resources and the growing problem of environmental pollution,the study of total factor productivity has begun to shift to green total factor productivity(herein referred to as “green productivity”),which is to incorporate environmental and energy factors into the measurement of total factor productivity,so as to measure the quality of economic development in a more scientific and reasonable way.Due to the obvious differences in resource endowment and industrial structure in various regions of China,the production technology presents significant regional heterogeneity.Therefore,based on the assumption of heterogeneity of production technology and the analytical tool of metafrontier theory,the paper uses the Metafrontier Malmquist Luenberger(MML)index to measure the green productivity of 30 provinces,autonomous regions,municipalities and different regions in China.On this basis,regional comparison and trend analysis are carried out,and the growth source and convergence of green productivity are deeply discussed according to the decomposition of MML,so as to provide theoretical basis and data reference for the formulation and implementation of China's regional economic development policies.The main innovation of this paper are: Applying the MML productivity index to the calculation of China's regional green productivity index,and using statistical nonparametric tests to verify the rationality of the application of the Metafrontier method to measure the regional green productivity index in China,while other scholars only considered the heterogeneity of the research object through qualitative description without testing from the statistical significance when applying this method.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)Although China maintained a relatively high GDP growth rate from 2000 to 2016,the average annual growth rate of green productivity was only 0.14%.The average annual decrease in technical efficiency was 0.9%,and the average annual increase in technical progress was 1.04%.It shows that the improvement of green productivity in China is mainly driven by technological progress rather than technical efficiency.(2)The green productivity index in the eastern region is the highest among the three regions,followed by the central region and the western region.The green productivity of the eastern region achieved sustained growth in 2000-2015,with the largest cumulative growth.The green productivity of the central region decreased greatly in 2000-2005 and then began to slowly increase.The cumulative growth of green productivity in the western region has been negative,with the most significant decline in 2000-2005.(3)According to the technical drop ratio indicator(TGR),the technical level of the eastern region has been close to or at the forefront of the overall technology.There is a certain gap between the central region and the western region compared with the technological frontier,and among the three regions,the gap of the central region and the technological frontier is the biggest.(4)China's green productivity has decreased significantly in the early 21 st century,when the promotion of heavy chemical industrialization and the expansion of high-pollution and high-energy-consuming industries,and it increased significantly in 2005-2008 and 2013,which was implemented with strict environmental regulations.Therefore,this confirms to some extent that the "Porter Hypothesis" was established in China.(5)The green productivity index of China and eastern,central and western regions showed absolute ?-convergence characteristics from 2000 to 2016,indicating that the growth gap of green productivity has gradually narrowed down both within the country and within the region.