Air pollutant and health-efficiency evaluation based on a dynamic network data envelopment analysis

Abstract

Environmental pollution and the associated societal health issues have attracted recent research attention. While most research has focused on the effect of air pollution on human health and local economies, few articles have discussed the environment, health, and economic development in in an integrated analysis. This paper used a Dynamic Network SBM Model to evaluate production and health efficiencies in Chinese cities and found that the production efficiency scores were slightly higher than the health efficiency scores, with the two-stage efficiency scores in most cities having significant fluctuations. Labor, fixed assets, energy, GDP, and lung disease and mortality reduction efficiencies in the first stage were generally high; however, the medical input efficiencies in the second stage were low, indicating that there was there significant room for improvement in many cities.