Strategic Environmental Assessment of Land Transportation: An Application of DEA with Undesirable Output Approach

The efficiency of land transportation contributes significantly to determining a country’s economic and environmental sustainability. The examination of land transportation efficiency encompasses performance and environmental efficiency to improve system performance and citizen satisfaction. Evaluating the efficiency of land transportation is a vital process to improve operation efficiency, decrease investment costs, save energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and enhance environmental protection. There are many methods for measuring transportation efficiency, but few papers have used the input and output data to evaluate the ecological efficiency of land transportation. This research focuses on evaluating the environmental efficiency for land transportation by using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method with undesirable output to handle unwanted data. By using this, the paper aims to measure the performance of land transportation in 25 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in the period of 2015–2019, considered as 25 decision-making units (DMUs) in the model. For identifying the ranking of DMUs, four inputs (infrastructure investment and maintenance, length of transport routes, labor force, and energy consumption) are considered. At the same time, the outputs consist of freight transport and passenger transport as desirable outputs and carbon dioxide emission (CO2) as an undesirable output. The proposed model effectively determines the environment-efficient DMUs in a very time-efficient manner. Managerial implications of the study provide further insight into the investigated measures and offer recommendations for improving the environmental efficiency of land transportation in OECD countries.

Spatial Distribution and Regional Difference of Environmental Efficiency Based on Carbon Reduction Goals: Evidence From China

China will strive to achieve carbon peak by 2030 and carbon neutralization by 2060 cooperating with the system dominated by carbon intensity control and supplemented by total carbon emission control. This paper analyzes the environmental efficiency index of China; the empirical results show that the average growth rate is 4.5% from 2006 to 2017. A further decomposition of changes on scale efficiency and pure technical efficiency indicates that the pure technical efficiency maintains a long-term growth, and scale efficiency shows a fluctuant tendency. The abovementioned changes show that various methods in China such as industrial structure adjustment and promotion of the development of high and new technologies have obtained a certain effect. From the perspectives of regional differences, the average changes of environmental efficiency in eastern, central, and western regions as well as most of provinces and cities are all on the increase. On the space layout, a trend has been presented that the average changes in central regions exceed those in eastern regions, while the average changes in western regions are comparatively lower than those in eastern regions.

Evaluation and Influencing Factors of Agricultural Green Efficiency in Jianghuai Ecological Economic Zone

Traditionally, in the pursuit of economic development, ecological health was sacrificed, but this is no longer tenable considering the vast environmental damage that is difficult to control and expensive to repair. This is especially true for China’s Jianghuai River Basin (JRB). As a result, this paper uses the slacks-based measure (SBM) directional distance function and the tobit model on panel data from various cities and counties in the Jiangsu section of the HRB to empirically analyze regional green agricultural production efficiency and influencing factors from 2005 to 2019. The results illustrate that agricultural and environmental efficiency fluctuate upward in provincial areas. Still, a downward trend is observed in both redundancy and insufficiency rates of undesirable and desirable output. While this indicates improving regional agricultural and environmental efficiency, there is no readily detectable positive effect of technological progress and technical efficiency on green agricultural production efficiency improvements. Following a full analysis, policy implications are presented and discussed.

Evaluation of the Effects of the Belt and Road Initiative on the Unified Economic and Environmental Efficiency of Transportation Infrastructure in China Based on Range-Adjusted Measure Model and Difference in Difference Model

The Belt and Road Initiative has brought new opportunities for countries along the routes to develop their transportation infrastructure. Through large-scale transportation infrastructure construction, these countries enhanced the Belt and Road cooperation with each other, which further facilitates the rapid development of their own economy, but whether this can promote the sustainable development of their own environment, relevant research is still lacking. In this paper, China is taken as the study subject to evaluate the comprehensive effects that the Belt and Road Initiative exerts on the economy and environment through improving transportation infrastructure. In the study, RAM indicators were first established to measure the unified economic and environmental efficiency of transportation infrastructure, a DID model was then built to study the effects of the Initiative on the unified efficiency, and mediation models were finally created to discuss the ways in which the Belt and Road Initiative can improve the unified economic and environmental efficiency of transportation infrastructure through transformation and upgrade of industrial structure. The study result shows that the Belt and Road Initiative can significantly promote the improvement of the unified economic and environmental efficiency of the national transportation infrastructure, but the result is regionally heterogeneous. The Initiative has positive effects in improving the unified efficiency in eastern region but has no effect in the central and western regions. Although the Initiative can significantly enhance the efficiency through transforming and upgrading the industrial structure, the industrial structure rationalization plays a primary positive role. This paper provides the empirical evidences to evaluate the implementation effects of the Initiative in the transportation infrastructure sector and verifies that countries along the routes can achieve sustainable development through large-scale transportation infrastructure construction under the Belt and Road Initiative.

Environmental efficiency of Xiangjiang River in China: a data envelopment analysis cross-efficiency approach

PurposeEnvironmental performance becomes a key issue for the sustainable development. Recently, incremental information technology is adopted to collect environmental data and improve environmental performance. Previous environmental efficiency measures mainly focus on individual decision-making units (DMUs). Benefited from the information technology, this paper develops a new environmental efficiency measure to explore the implicit alliances among DMUs and applies it to Xiangjiang River.Design/methodology/approachThis study formulates a new data envelopment analysis (DEA) environmental cross-efficiency measure that considers DMUs' alliances. Each DMUs' alliance is formulated by the DMUs who are supervised by the same manager. In cross-efficiency evaluation context, this paper adopts DMUs' alliances rather than individual DMUs to derive the environmental cross-efficiency measure considering undesirable outputs. Furthermore, the Tobit regression is conducted to analyze the influence of exogenous factors about the environmental cross-efficiency.FindingsThe findings show that (1) Chenzhou performs the best while Xiangtan performed the worst along Xiangjiang River. (2) The environmental efficiency of cities in Xiangjiang River is generally low. Increasing public budgetary expenditure can improve environmental efficiency of cities. (3) The larger the alliance size, the higher environmental efficiency. (4) The income level is negatively correlated with environmental efficiency, indicating that the economy is at the expense of the environment in Xiangjiang River.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to developing a new environmental DEA cross-efficiency measure considering DMUs' alliance, and combining DEA cross-efficiency and Tobit regression in environmental performance measurement of Xiangjiang River. This paper examines the exogenous factors that have influences on environmental efficiency of Xiangjiang River and derive policy implications to improve the sustainable operation.