Spatial–temporal evolution and regional difference decomposition of urban environmental governance efficiency in China

The three-stage DEA method and super-SBM are combined to measure the urban environmental governance efficiency of 30 provinces in China from 2004 to 2016. Then, ArcGIS software is used to illustrate the spatial–temporal evolution of urban environmental governance efficiency, and DagumGiniratio is calculated to show the regional difference. The results indicate that the provinces characterized by high or low environmental governance efficiency are shown to cluster in space over time, and the spatial dependence of the environmental governance behavior of government is the greatest source of the regional difference of urban environmental governance efficiency. Our findings imply that the environmental governance behavior of government is spatial dependent, which highlights that the policies for improve environmental governance efficiency should be made globally.