Research On The Efficiency Of China’s Energy-Economy-Environment System From Multiple Perspectives

China,as the largest energy consumer and carbon dioxide emitter in the world,is under tremendous pressure in energy conservation and emission reduction.The energy-economy-environment system is vital for coordinating economic development and mitigating energy and environmental issues.How to accurately measure and analyze the efficiency of the energy-economy-environment system is an issue of common concern for academia.To this end,this paper researches the efficiency evaluation of China’s provincial energy-economy-environment system from a multidimensional perspective,aiming to reveal the system development comprehensively and provide support for efficiency improvement.Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA),a nonparametric frontier method for efficiency evaluation of the system with multiple inputs and outputs,is used in various fields such as energy,environment,and sustainable development evaluation.Due to the high complexity of the realistic energy-economy-environment system,traditional DEA has several shortcomings in the empirical analysis:First,existing methods usually assume Decision-Making Units(DMU)satisfy homogeneity,while differences in economic development levels and other aspects in Chinese provinces lead to technological heterogeneity;Second,most of the existing studies regard the system as a black box composed of initial inputs and final outputs,without considering the production conversion processes within the system,such as the treatment process of wastewater;Third,existing research has proposed many solutions to the efficiency discrimination of multiple efficient DMUs,such as the super efficiency technique,but few on network DEA models;Fourth,efficiency analysis based on DEA relies on input-output data,while actual data are often affected by uncertainty factors such as noise,resulting in a gap between nominal and real values.Few studies have focused on efficiency evaluation in an uncertain environment.For this reason,this paper proposes a series of modified DEA models based on a systematic analysis of the internal production processes of the energy-economy-environment system from multiple perspectives.And the proposed models are applied to the input-output data at the provincial level in China.Based on the empirical analysis,several policy recommendations are provided for improving the efficiency of China’s provincial energy-economy-environment system.The main contents of this research are listed as follows:(1)Research on the efficiency of China’s provincial energy-economy-environment system from the perspective of technological heterogeneity.This study examines the efficiency differences,efficiency imbalances,and their sources of technology heterogeneity systems under different emission reduction strategies.Furthermore,based on the meta-frontier theory,the dynamic changes in system efficiency and their driving factors are analyzed.(2)Research on the efficiency of China’s provincial energy-economy-environment system from the perspective of energy processing and conversion.This paper focuses on a two-stage system composed of energy processing and conversion and economic growth,and applies the common set of weights method combined with the Malmquist-DEA model to study the dynamic changes and its driving factors of the system efficiency.(3)Research on the efficiency of China’s provincial energy-economy-environment system from the perspective of carbon emission uncertainty.This study focuses on a two-stage system composed of industrial production and environment protection,and applies the robust optimization method combined with super efficiency network DEA to study the development status of industrial systems under uncertain environments.(4)Research on the efficiency of China’s provincial energy-economy-environment system from the perspective of health concerns.This study focuses on the sustainability issue of the system and constructs a three-stage network structure system that considers health factors.By applying the super efficiency DEA model with slack measurement,the sustainability of the system is measured and analyzed.The conclusions of this paper are listed as follows:(1)The system efficiency under technological heterogeneity shows a slow upward trend,and innovation effect is the driving force for efficiency improvement.The system efficiency under natural emission reduction strategies is higher and the regional gap is smaller.The efficiency gap between efficient and inefficient systems is widening,leading to an increase in overall efficiency imbalance.The efficiency inefficiency of carbon dioxide is the main reason for the efficiency gap under natural emission reduction strategies,while the efficiency inefficiency of labor and GDP is the main reason for managing the efficiency gap under emission reduction strategies.(2)From the perspective of energy processing and conversion,the overall efficiency of the system,energy processing and conversion efficiency,and economic growth efficiency exhibit regional heterogeneity.The eastern,central,and western regions have shown growth trends in system efficiency,economic growth efficiency,and energy processing and conversion efficiency,respectively,while the overall efficiency of the country tends to be table.The overall system and technical efficiency of energy processing and conversion are increasing with a technology decline.(3)The overall efficiency of China’s provincial industrial system showed an upward trend,due to the efficiency improvement in the industrial production stage.There is regional heterogeneity in the overall efficiency,industrial production stage efficiency,and environmental governance stage efficiency of China’s provincial industrial system.In addition,most provinces are in the "low industrial production-low environmental governance"industrial development mode.The key to transforming the industrial development mode is to improve industrial environmental governance capabilities.(4)From the perspective of health concerns,the level of system sustainability shows a downward trend followed by an upward trend.The efficiency in the eastern region is the highest,and the time fluctuation of the efficiency in the western region is relatively small,with a certain gap and a trend of expansion.The efficiency in the central region is lower than that in the western region,and the efficiency in the northeast region is the lowest.From the perspective of specific provinces,Hainan has shown efficiency advantages in wastewater and solid waste emission reduction and pollution treatment,as well as population morbidity control,Beijing has shown efficiency advantages in wastewater emission reduction and wastewater treatment.The main contributions of this paper are listed as follows:(1)For the issue of technological heterogeneity in the system,this study considers the effectiveness of different emission reduction strategies and constructs a dual frontier DEA classification model.Combined with the meta-frontier theory,this paper proposes a DEA efficiency analysis framework for technological heterogeneity systems to measure the system efficiency more accurately.Based on the efficiency evaluation results,this article constructs an efficiency imbalance index,which provides quantitative reference information for narrowing the efficiency gap and promoting overall efficiency improvement.(2)For the production variable shadow price of a two-stage system considering energy processing conversion,this paper proposes a Malmquist network DEA method with common weights.This method can effectively depict the shadow price of all production variables,and realize the complete discrimination of static efficiency and intertemporal efficiency in the system and its sub stages.Then,this study conducts a thorough analysis of the impact of energy processing conversion on the dynamic changes in the overall efficiency of the system.(3)For the issue of the uncertainty of carbon emissions in industrial systems,this study proposes a robust super efficiency network DEA method by constructing a polyhedral uncertainty set and introducing robust optimization techniques.This method can not only evaluate the efficiency of the system in uncertain environments,but also accurately measure the internal production efficiency and environmental protection efficiency.Based on the efficiency evaluation results,this study compares and analyzes the development status and models of industrial systems in various provinces.(4)For the issue of system sustainability,this study proposes a modified super efficiency network DEA model by introducing slack variables.This model can not only measure the system sustainability,but also accurately identify the specific sources of system efficiency advantages,including stage sources and production factor sources.Based on the efficiency evaluation results,this study evaluates and analyzes the sustainable development status of various provincial systems and provides improvement directions for inefficient systems.