Natural and Managerial Disposability Based DEA Model for China's Regional Environmental Efficiency Assessment

With the acceleration of industrialization, a large amount of energy consumption has brought tremendous pressure to the natural environment. In order to prevent environmental pollution and promote sustainable development, the environmental efficiency assessment as an effective way to provide decision-making basis has been given wide attention. This study measures the environmental efficiency of 30 provinces in China from 2006 to 2015 based on the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) environmental assessment radial model both under natural disposability and managerial disposability that considered the constant variable return to scale (RTS) and the damage to scale (DTS). In addition, the scale efficiency under the two kinds of disposability of China's 30 provinces were also measured. We found that the environmental efficiencies of different provinces in China showed regional disparities. Provinces such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong had a good performance in unified environmental efficiency and scale efficiency both under natural disposability and managerial disposability. Generally speaking, the eastern regions always performed better than the central and western regions in unified environmental efficiency during the observed years. Therefore, policies should be established to distribute the resources in balance between the east, center, and west to further promote environmental efficiency.