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Over the years, foreign direct investment (FDI) has not only promoted rapid economic growth in China, but also affected the country's environmental quality through technology spillover. This paper tests the variables that may affect the ability of green innovation by using the Granger causality test. It extracts the variables passed the test as input variables, selects the number of patents as output variable, and evaluates the efficiency of various provinces in mainland China by examining their yearly technological progress variables. At the same time, technological progress is defined and divided into capital and environmental factors, and then panel data using the variable coefficients model was used to fit influencing factors to obtain impact coefficients of capital and environment. On this basis, this paper makes the determination of membership to replace the general sense of 'threshold' value by using fuzzy theory and proposes the concept of the 'comprehensive threshold' of economic development and environmental protection. The results show that less than a quarter of China's provinces have crossed the comprehensive threshold. Finally, based on the conclusions of quantitative analysis, some suggestions are proposed that the Chinese government ought to enact different strategies for the introduction of FDI according to different development situations of different provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a new measurement for regional/national sustainable social economic development based on data envelopment analysis. This new measurement can reveal the impact of energy over-consumption and pollutant over-emission on economic development, giving regional/national sustainable development a more proper measure. This new measurement is applied into an empirical study for 10 year (2004–2013) sustainable development analysis of 30 regions in mainland China. The empirical results show that: (1) China has a quite unsustainable development in 2004–2013, and the level of unsustainability increased over time. The primary driver of these two phenomenon is pollutant over-emission and resource over-consumption respectively. (2) Area-wide sustainable development in China is quite unbalanced. Eastern China has a much better sustainable development as compared to other areas, and the variation of Eastern China's sustainable level is very little in 2004–2013. (3) Resource over-consumption and pollutant over-emission in western China are serious, even the absolute values are quite low. This makes western China develop unsustainably in 2004–2013. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bank industry plays a critical role in the economic development of China. In this paper, we develop a new two-stage data envelopment analysis approach for measuring the slacks-based efficiency of Chinese commercial banks during years 2008-2012, where the banking operation process of each bank is divided into a deposit-generation stage (division) and a deposit-utilization stage (division). In the approach, the increase of desirable outputs and the decrease of undesirable outputs are simultaneously considered in order to identify the inefficiency of a bank. Three efficiency statuses are first defined for such a system to investigate its input-output performance and divisional performances, and a full efficiency status is then defined based on these statuses. The empirical results show that the improvement of the banks' performances during this period was mainly contributed by the improvement of deposit-utilization stage. Besides, the results also show that our approach can provide a benchmark for the intermediate measures of the two stages of an inefficient bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The industry activities produce massive bad by-products, in the form of waste water, waste gas or solid waste, which are the source of environmental issues. The growing concerns over environmental problems make China reconsider the current developing pattern, and partially necessitate the reformation of economic structure. If the environmental consequences from economic structure reformation are subject to empirical testing, it is of vital importance to make some actual measurement for environmental performance. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a slacks-based environmental efficiency index based on data envelopment analysis (DEA). An empirical application to industry sector of China presents the following findings: (1) approximately two-thirds of the nation's provinces are inefficient due to excessive resource utilization, insufficient products or considerable quantities of wastes; (2) Spearman test shows that SO and solid waste intensity have more impacts on industrial aggregated efficiency than those of electricity and COD intensity do, which implies that waste gas and solid waste should be paid more attention in pollution abatement; (3) the environmental protection activities have yielded the expected benefits, as the aggregated efficiency of regional industry has been on a rising trend during the past decade; (4) the west region of China has been developing quickly in recently years and performs well both in economy and environmental control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: China's high-quality economic development depends on achieving sustainable economic development, reaching peak carbon emissions, achieving carbon neutrality, and intensifying the development of an industrial and energy structure that saves resources and protects the environment. This study used the data envelopment analysis (DEA) model and the Malmquist productivity index to measure the economic development performance of mainland China under carbon emission constraints. Then, it described the spatiotemporal evolution of economic development performance and analyzed its influencing factors using the Tobit model. Results: The results revealed that there were obvious differences in the trends of the static and dynamic performance of economic development. On the one hand, the static performance of economic development exhibited an upward trend from 2008 to 2020. Its distribution characteristics were dominant in the higher and high-level areas. On the other hand, the dynamic performance had a downward trend from 2008 to 2016 and then an upward trend from 2016 to 2020. In most provinces, the dynamic performance was no longer constrained by technological progress but rather by scale efficiency. It was found that the main factors influencing economic development performance were urbanization level, energy efficiency, vegetation coverage, and foreign investment, while other factors had no significant influence. Conclusions: This study suggests that China should improve its economic development performance by increasing the use of clean energy, promoting human-centered urbanization, increasing carbon absorption capacity, and absorbing more foreign capital in the future. [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]