Measuring environmental-adjusted dynamic energy efficiency of China’s transportation sector: a four-stage NDDF-DEA approach

Abstract

The energy consumption and CO2 emissions of the transportation sector in China have increased greatly in recent years, accompanied by the growing regional disparities. Considering undesirable output and environmental impact factors, a four-stage DEA (data envelope analysis) combined with NDDF model (non-radical directional distance function) is adopted in this paper to calculate the energy efficiency and eliminate the environmental impacts of Chinese transportation sector. In this paper, five environmental factors are considered, including GDP per capita, consumption level, urbanization level, economic openness level, and transport infrastructure. The empirical results on the panel data for 30 provinces of China from 2005 to 2016 show that the energy efficiency of the transportation sector in China decreases from Eastern to Western region. After the adjustment of environmental factors, energy efficiency still shows a decreasing trend from Eastern to Western region, while energy efficiency increases more in Eastern region and less in Central region and Western region. The potential of energy efficiency improvement for some Central and Western provinces is relatively high. Some policy suggestions are proposed to improve the energy efficiency of Chinese transportation sector.