Assessing Efficiency of Urban Land Utilisation under Environmental Constraints in Yangtze River Delta, China

Measuring the efficiency of construction land utilisation is important for optimising the allocation of regional resources and guiding the sustainable development of the regional society and economy. Based on municipal panel data on urban land use from 2009 to 2017 from a municipal perspective, this research built a slacks-based measure of a super-efficiency model (SE-SBM) to evaluate the temporal and spatial differentiation characteristics of the construction land-use efficiency of 41 cities in the Yangtze River Delta. Following this, the driving force of construction land efficiency was calculated using the Malmquist–Luenberger index. Finally, the entropy-weight TOPSIS (technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution) model and the k-means clustering method were applied to evaluate an input–output model of the cities. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) The construction land efficiency of the Yangtze River Delta remains at a low level and presents a spatial differentiation pattern, with the efficiency being higher in the east and lower in the west. Due to undesired outputs, the mean value has dropped by 4.67%, and the regional imbalance has decreased. (2) The degree of efficiency loss is significantly positively correlated with the intensity of urban pollution emissions—the higher the pollution emissions, the greater the efficiency loss. (3) The total factor productivity of urban construction land is mainly driven by technological progress, while the promotion of technical efficiency is low and unstable. (4) The evaluation of construction land efficiency must include resource allocation or pollution emission factors to scientifically measure the input–output level. These research results will help to formulate reasonable land-use countermeasures.