Energy and environmental efficiency of China's transportation sectors under the constraints of energy consumption and environmental pollutions

By Qingyuan Zhu, Xingchen Li, Feng Li, Jie Wu, Dequn Zhou. Energy Economics, 2020

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The rapid growth of the economy in China has caused many problems for the country, particularly the energy shortage and environmental pollution. Thus, establishing a sustainable development of society has attracted considerable attention in recent years. In this paper, we evaluate the sustainability efficiency in terms of energy usage and environmental impact by using a new equilibrium efficient frontier data envelopment analysis (EEFDEA) approach. For the first time, DEA is used in the context of required fixed reductions in both total energy consumption and total environmental pollution, which is a realistic context that introduces a “zero-sum” aspect to the problem. As part of the analysis, the generalized equilibrium efficient frontier (EEF) is constructed based on minimum satisfaction degree maximization of all units, considering both minimum and maximum adjustment strategy, while most existing studies only minimized the weighted sum reduction. Finally, the sustainability efficiency of transportation sectors of China's 30 main regions is analyzed by using our proposed model. The results show that more effective measures should be taken for sustainable development.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6c7d23c10c75ca921e861464b594b0600489bb56