Measuring the resource and environmental efficiency of industrial water consumption in China: A non-radial directional distance function

摘要

With the rapid economic growth and water consumption, the study on measuring the environmental efficiency of water use and wastewater emission has attracted increasing attention. This paper constructs a new non-radial directional distance function to separately scale the performance of water use and wastewater emission in more accurate way, that is also feasible to evaluate the effects of technology heterogeneities on environmental efficiency based on meta-frontier analysis. An application study of 31 Chinese provinces from 2011 to 2015 was done after constructing two numerical examples to show the use of models. The empirical results of the study reveal that: (1) There exist significant group-heterogeneity across different areas in China, in which the eastern area performs best while the average technology gap of central and western areas are 51% and 34%; (2) The performance on water use is better than wastewater emission, China's provinces need to produce additional 11.25% desirable outputs and decrease 19.46% wastewater emission based on the input level in 2015. Moreover, this paper calculates the efficiency scores and provides targets for performance improvement for each province in different years. Policy implications indicate that the environmental efficiency of industrial water in China is mostly related to technological heterogeneity in different regions. Therefore, the managers need to set different standards to evaluate the performance of provinces in different areas. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.