Urban Ecological Welfare Performance In The Yangtze River Delta Region For Years 2013-2018: Evaluation And Implications

With the rapid advancement of industrialization and urbanization,the Yangtze River Delta region has experienced rapid economic growth.Meanwhile,the shortage of resources and environmental pollution have seriously aggravated sustainable development,especially in populous and economically developed urban areas.Since the 18 th CPC National Congress,a new type of environmental friendly urbanization has been continuously promoted,and Chinese cities are facing a sustainable transformation from quantity growth to quality improvement.In order to achieve sustainable urbanization,it is important to improve the quality and efficiency of development,and to minimize the consumption of natural resources as well as ecological and environmental costs in exchange for the maximum social welfare.Ecological welfare performance(EWP)is the efficiency of transforming the consumption of human natural resources into the level of social welfare,which can evaluate the level of sustainable development and the effectiveness of ecological civilization construction.In this thesis,an urban ecological welfare performance evaluation index system is formulated from three dimensions,which are resource consumption,environmental pollution and social welfare.The PCA-Super SBM combination method is used to statically evaluate the ecological welfare performance of the Yangtze River Delta cities from 2013 to 2018,and the redundancy of input and deficiency of output in inefficient provinces and cities are analyzed.The Malmquist index is used to dynamically analyze the changes in performance,and the reasons for the changes from the perspective of technical progress change,pure technical efficiency change and scale efficiency change are analyzed.This thesis further studies the spatial imbalance of urban ecological welfare performance,by using the Dagum Gini coefficient and its decomposition method to analyze the relative disparity,sources and contribution degrees of urban ecological welfare performance among three provinces,and using the kernel density estimation method to visually show the changes of the absolute disparity of urban ecological welfare performance in the Yangtze River Delta,in order to provide support for regional disparity research.Finally,urban ecological welfare performance is taken as the explained variable,and influencing factors(population density,industrial structure,urbanization level,technological progress,degree of opening to the outside world,environmental regulation and greening degree)are selected as the explanatory variables.This thesis establishes a panel Tobit regression model to analyze the influence of factors on ecological welfare performance.The results show that the overall urban ecological welfare performance level of the Yangtze River Delta from 2013 to 2018 was not high and did not reach the most effective production frontier(EWP<1);the performance declined at the beginning of the research period,but rose again after 2014,mainly due to the increase of ecological civilization construction since the 18 th CPC National Congress;the performance of three provinces and one city were different,and the ranking is Shanghai(1.0162)>Anhui(0.9161)>Jiangsu(0.8645)>Zhejiang(0.8643)in terms of the six-year average.The spatial distribution of urban ecological welfare performance is random.The highlevel(EWP ≥ 1.2)and relatively high-level(1 ≤EWP < 1.2)cities were mainly distributed in the northwest,east and south of the Yangtze River Delta,and relatively low-level(0.6≤EWP<1)and low-level(EWP<0.6)cities were mainly distributed in the northern,central,southwestern and southeastern parts.The main reasons why cities were non-DEA effective were that the input of resource consumption and environmental pollution was too much,and the output of education was inadequate.The dynamic analysis on performance changes shows that although the overall urban performance of the Yangtze River Delta first decreased and then increased,the performance in 2018 was still slightly lower than that in 2013(which decreased by0.9%),and the technology recession was the key reason for the decline in performance.Research on spatial imbalances shows that the main source of the relative disparity among the three provinces was the super variable density(The contribution rate is 50%-60%),and the secondary source was the intra-regional disparity.The regional relative disparity was decreasing,but the absolute disparity was expanding during the study period,which reflected the low-level cities were still facing many difficulties,and the imbalance and insufficiency of the sustainable development of the Yangtze River Delta cities was still serious.In terms of influencing factors,population density was significantly positively correlated with ecological welfare performance,urbanization level was significantly negatively correlated with ecological welfare performance,technological progress,degree of openness,environmental regulation and green degree were insignificantly positively correlated with performance,and industrial structure was insignificantly negatively correlated with performance.Finally,this thesis provides enlightenments for policy formulation of urban construction and regional development in the Yangtze River Delta during and after the14 th Five-Year Plan period.Cities should adhere to a compact,concentrated,economical and efficient development and construction mode,continuously promote the collaborative cooperation in key areas such as ecological environment,technological innovation,education and medical care,and accelerate the formation of resource-saving and environment-friendly mode of production and life.Only in this way can we continuously improve urban ecological welfare performance and regional sustainable development level.