Measuring environmental sustainability performance of freight transportation seaports in China: A data envelopment analysis approach based on the closest targets

摘要

Because of China's rapid economic development, its freight transportation system has grown to become one of China's high-pollution-emission sectors. However, there are few studies that pay close attention to measuring and improving the environmental performance of China's freight transportation system, especially in regard to seaports. In this paper, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is applied to measure the environmental performance of freight transportation seaports. In addition, we also provide benchmarking information to point the way to improving environmental performance effectively. Our proposed DEA model is based on the closest targets, which satisfies the strong monotonicity and can yield the most relevant solution for the inefficient seaports. An empirical study of 21 of China's primary freight transportation seaports shows that most of them have relatively good environmental performance. Among the five coastal port groups, the Bohai-rim port group had the best environmental performance, whereas the Pearl River port group had the worst. Our data show significant differences between the best and worst performances, indicating that more measures should be taken to balance and coordinate the development between the five coastal port groups.