Public Sector Performance Assessment Based on DEA Model: The Case of Environmental Policy

Abstract

The contradiction between economic development and environmental protection is a core issue that plagues developing countries. The Chinese government has continuously implemented different environmental policies to alleviate the contradiction between economic development and environmental protection, but how they will perform remains unknown. Therefore, this paper revises the classical DEA model and then empirically evaluates the efficiency of environmental policies in 31 Chinese provinces from 2015 to 2020. It is found that the environmental efficiency of each local government has steadily improved, and the provincial differences show a trend of continuous reduction. However, when decomposed, the technical efficiency gap among provinces is large, and the scale efficiency even shows a downward trend. This paper also adopts the Malmquist index for dynamic analysis of environmental efficiency, and the research findings have important theoretical value for scientific formulation of environmental policies.