Cross-Regional Comparative Study on Environmental–Economic Efficiency and Driving Forces behind Efficiency Improvement in China: A Multistage Perspective

Environmental–economic efficiency assessment is an effective way to evaluate the degree of coordination between an economy and the environment. Previous studies on environmental–economic efficiency have primarily investigated the efficiency of economic production and have often overlooked the efficiency of pollution treatment in overall economic activities. We applied a network data envelopment analysis model to evaluate the environmental–economic efficiency of a multistage process with undesirable outputs in 30 Chinese provinces during 2001–2017. The multistage process consisted of two sequential stages: economic production and pollution treatment. The results show that the average environmental–economic efficiency across all provinces was generally low but demonstrated a gradual upward trend during the study period. The spatial pattern for the 30 provinces showed that provinces with medium or high environmental–economic efficiency are mainly located in the eastern regions in China. Finally, few provinces exhibited economic activities with high economic production and pollution treatment efficiency, with most provinces generally having low economic production and pollution treatment efficiency. Hence, provinces with different economic production and pollution treatment efficiency modes should implement targeted improvement strategies according to their characteristics.