Title: Assessing ecological efficiency of China's urban agglomerations using data envelopment analysis

Authors: Jie Wu; Yinghao Pan; Zhixiang Zhou; Xiaoxing Liang

Addresses: School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China ' School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China ' School of Economics, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, 230009, China ' School of Public Affairs, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

Abstract: Air pollution is an increasingly serious problem in urban areas as urban agglomerations develop. Ecological efficiency assessment is a key method of regional environmental regulation, and data envelopment analysis (DEA) models are widely utilised to compute ecological efficiency scores in the presence of stochastic factors. This paper focuses on two kinds of relationships among cities within urban agglomerations and constructs DEA models by inserting the different relationship matrices. The new models are utilised to assess the ecological efficiency of China's three major urban agglomerations, namely "Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei", "Yangtze River Delta", and "Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area", using a system with pollution emission indexes. The results of our empirical study illustrate the performance of urban agglomerations from 2014 to 2019 and provide details about efficiency scores for their member cities.

Keywords: air pollution; efficiency assessment; DEA; data envelopment analysis; urban agglomeration.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEP.2021.132007

International Journal of Environment and Pollution, 2021 Vol.70 No.3/4, pp.184 - 202

Received: 28 Mar 2022
Received in revised form: 12 Jul 2022
Accepted: 02 Sep 2022
Published online: 06 Jul 2023 *

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