Regional green innovation efficiency and dynamic evolution of Chinese industrial enterprises: a three-stage super-efficiency DEA method based on cooperative game.

The level of development of industrial enterprises is related to a country's or region's overall competitiveness. It is critical to assess the green innovation efficiency of regional industrial enterprises scientifically and effectively in order to improve a country's overall green innovation capability. The green innovation system is divided into three sub-stages in this paper: technology development, economic transformation, and environmental protection. Based on the theory of innovation value chain, a three-stage super-efficiency DEA model of the cooperative game including shared inputs and undesirable outputs is constructed to calculate the overall efficiency, three sub-stages efficiency, and dynamic evolution of green innovation of industrial enterprises in China's provincial administrative regions and eight economic zones from 2015 to 2019 (divided by the time of ultimate output). The results indicate that (1) in terms of overall efficiency, the efficiency of green innovation is not high, and there are clear regional differences, as evidenced by the following states: the middle reaches of the Yangtze River economic zone > the eastern coastal economic zone > the southern coastal economic zone > the northern coastal economic zone > the northeastern economic zone > the northwestern economic zone > the middle reaches of the Yellow River economic zone, and the overall efficiency of the southwestern economic zone fluctuates around the average level of China; (2) from the standpoint of various stages, economic transformation stage efficiency > overall efficiency > technology development stage efficiency > environmental protection stage efficiency. The improvement of overall efficiency is largely dependent on the high efficiency of the economic transformation stage, but low efficiency in the environmental protection stage results in overall low efficiency; (3) from the perspective of the dynamic evolution trend, the overall efficiency and three sub-stages have been improved to varying degrees. However, due to the low efficiency of the environmental protection stage, there is still a long way to go to achieve the goal of innovation-driven development; (4) based on the classification analysis, it was determined that the green innovation efficiency of industrial enterprises in only a few regions belongs to the "three high innovation type," which must take targeted measures to improve the inefficient innovation process links. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]