Dynamic Estimation of Urban Land Use Efficiency and Sustainability Analysis in China

With rapid urbanization in China, land use efficiency (LUE) and related sustainability should be reasonably evaluated and improved. Studies have rarely investigated urban LUE and lack an analysis from the sustainability perspective. Long-term analysis can help identify the weaknesses in LUE and obtain a more stable evaluation. Hence, in this paper we develop a dynamic data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to assess urban LUE considering the time dimension. Differing from studies on traditional static DEA models, this study connects the observed periods by creating a common objective function. In addition, a method for estimating the sustainability of urban LUE is proposed under the DEA framework. The proposed method was applied to 34 major Chinese cities over a 3-year period, from 2015 to 2017. The results reveal that urban LUE still has potential for improvement in most cities. There was a distinct difference in efficiency among eastern, central, and western cities during the observed period. The average efficiency was higher in eastern cities than in central and western cities. The potential to optimize the land area and GDP should be realized with more efforts by most cities to strengthen LUE. Additionally, most inefficient cities have weak performance regarding the sustainability of LUE. The proposed approach enriches the sustainable measurement of LUE. Some management implications are provided to improve urban LUE. The empirical findings provide important support for sustainable land use in practice, and the proposed model is an important empirical extension of the DEA method in the land management field.