Innovation and environmental performance: An empirical study of 31 cities in China

Abstract

After its rapid economic growth, China has been faced with the very serious problem of atmospheric pollution, leading to major long-term atmospheric problems in large cities. Air pollution not only afiects normal lives of people, but also has a huge negative impact on their bodies, causing diseases, impacting productivity, and inuencing their creativity. In the previous research studies, the inuence of environmental variables has been ignored in the discussions of the effciency of innovation. Accordingly, this study combines energy consumption, economics, environmental variables, innovative research, and development capabilities to analyze and explore the relationship among consumption, environment, economy, and innovative Research and Development (R&D) capabilities. Dynamic Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was carried out to calculate energy consumption efifciency , R& input efifciency , innovation patent output efciency, carbon dioxide emission efifciency , and Air Quality Index (AQI) effciency for each city. Also, the cities were compared for their potential of improvement. The results of the study showed that 10 cities had the total effciency score of one, implying the improvement space of zero, whereas the total effciency scores of the other 21 cities indicated that there was still much room for improvement with big difierences among the cities.