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With the rapid development of China's economy, the problems of China's energy shortage and environmental pollution have become increasingly prominent. However, few studies have evaluated energy and environment efficiency from the perspective of energy production and energy utilisation. From supply chain perspective, this paper uses a two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to measure the efficiency of China's regional energy and environment by considering both energy production and utilisation systems. Specifically, the production in each region is regarded as a two-stage network structure. The first stage is the energy production system, and the second stage is the energy utilisation system. Then, an efficiency decomposition programme is proposed to obtain the highest subsystem efficiency. Our empirical study on 30 main province-level regions of Chinese mainland shows that most of these regions are inefficient in both stages of energy production and utilisation. The energy production system has a negative impact on overall efficiency. In addition, China's three major areas have unbalanced development. The eastern has the highest efficiency, followed by the central, and then the western part. Our empirical results provide effective measures in improving energy and environment efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid economic development of China has intensified the country's many problems. Among them, energy shortage and environmental pollution are two main problems, which highly affects the economic growth and sustainable development. To achieve more rapid green growth, the innovative technology by reusing the environmental wastes has been widely used since doing so not only decreases the environment pollution, but also further brings more natural resource. The present paper establishes a two-stage structure for evaluating the regional green growth and sustainable development in China by calculating the efficiency of "energy saving" and "pollution treatment" separately. Specifically, a set of models based on slack-based measure approach are constructed in which non-discretionary inputs can be calculated in both resource utilization stage and pollution treatment stage. Comparing with the traditional models, the new proposed models can measure the performance of resources saving and pollution treatment with considering the influence of non-discretionary inputs. An empirical application on Chinese 30 regions during 2011–2015 have been done to illustrate the use of our framework and the performance of regional green growth and sustainable development. Based on the efficiency results, we find that the efficiency scores of the provinces in central and northeast area are lower, which is mostly caused by their poor performance on "pollution treatment". Both the environmental efficiency scores and target values for performance improvement are obtained in this paper to enlighten the corresponding decision-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid economic development in China has intensified the country's many problems, such as environmental pollution. Coal-fired power plants are a major source of environmental pollution. In order to effectively reduce environmental pollution, it is particularly important that China's coal-fired power plants reach the best performance standards. In this paper, data envelopment analysis is used to evaluate the environmental efficiency of 27 coal-fired power plants in China. First, we develop a range adjusted measurement (RAM) efficiency measure based on farthest target which considers undesirable output to measure the environmental efficiency. Then, based on the fact that benchmarking information can offer a pivotal pathway for inefficient DMUs to achieve efficiency, another RAM environmental efficiency measure, based on closest target, is built to analyze the efficiency and give the closest benchmarking information. The empirical study shows that closest targets are more easily attainable and provide the most relevant solution to remove inefficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increased concern over environmental pollution issues in China has caused eco-efficiency analysis to become a hot research topic. This study focuses on the eco-efficiency analysis of Chinese provincial-level regions, regarding each region as a two-stage network structure. The first stage is characterized as the production system and the second stage as the pollution control system. Regarding the pollution emissions as intermediate products, a two-stage data envelopment analysis model is proposed to obtain the eco-efficiency of the whole two-stage system. To measure efficiencies for the two sub-stages in each system, an equitable efficiency decomposition model and an algorithm are provided. Next, an empirical study of regional eco-efficiency analysis of 30 Chinese regions reveals that in 2013 the majority of these regions in China had poor ecological performance. Further, four categories of regions are identified by analyzing the efficiencies of each region's two sub-stages and some suggestions are provided to improve the eco-efficiencies of regions in each category. Additionally, analysis of regional disparities in eco-efficiency shows that in China the average eco-efficiency of the eastern area is higher than those of the central and western areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's rapid development in economy has intensified many problems. One of the most important issues is the problem of environmental pollution. In this paper, a new DEA approach is proposed to measure the environmental efficiency of thermoelectric power plants, considering undesirable outputs. First, we assume that the total amount of undesirable outputs of any particular type is limited and fixed to current levels. In contrast to previous studies, this study requires fixed-sum undesirable outputs. In addition, the common equilibrium efficient frontier is constructed by using different input/output multipliers (or weights) for each different decision making unit (DMU), while previous approaches which considered fixed-sum outputs assumed a common input/output multiplier for all DMUs. The proposed method is applied to measure the environmental efficiencies of 30 thermoelectric power plants in mainland China. Our empirical study shows that half of the plants perform well in terms of environmental efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid development in economy of China has intensified the country's many problems, such as environmental pollution and energy shortage. Thus, establishing a society with resource conservation and environmental harmony, typically reusing the pollution and waste from the industrial production, has attracted attention from both the government and the public in recent years. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been widely used in measuring two-stage network structures that constituted with homogenous decision making units. However, previous works failed to take the undesirable intermediate products into account in the two-stage network structures including production system and disposal system. In this study, we build an additive DEA approach to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed new two-stage network structures, and propose a better efficiency decomposition to the individual system. Finally, our approach is applied to analyze the industrial production in 30 provincial level regions in mainland China and some implications are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The new power supply structure resulting from the new policy has been considered. • The new models project the inefficient points onto a more realistic efficient frontier. • The new models have the power to allocate the shared resources. • Results show that the power production stage is allocated less shared resources. • The power sale stage's efficiency is lower than the one of power production stage. To relieve the problems of energy shortage and environmental pollution, many countries have implemented a variety of policies to improve the energy efficiency of the power industry. To understand the impacts of such policies on energy efficiency, this paper constructs novel network data envelopment analysis models to recognize the policy-induced structural changes in the power system. Compared with previous studies, the new models project the inefficient points onto a more realistic efficient production frontier, considering how the distribution proportion of shared resources will change when the power system, modeled as a power generation stage and a power sale stage, is led by the latter stage. Our empirical study on China's power system shows that the province of Guangdong and the eastern region of China perform best, and all power production stages perform better than the corresponding power sale stages. The development of the two power subsystems in the four regions is unbalanced. More than half of the power supply systems choose to allocate more proportion of the shared resources to the sale stage rather than use a more balanced distribution between the two stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]