Calculation of China’s environmental efficiency and relevant hierarchical cluster analysis from the perspective of regional differences

Abstract

With the measuring results of environmental efficiency as a basis, redundancy rates of labor, capital stock, energy consumption and three kinds of industrial wastes in each province are calculated respectively by using hierarchical cluster analysis, which suggests that China can be divided into three kinds of economic-environmental zone, namely, intensively-developed zone, optimally-developed zone and slowly-developed zone. Analysis of redundancy rates indicates that the key to improvement of environmental efficiency is to reduce resource waste and emission of three kinds of industrial wastes. Environmental efficiency of the four main regions in China is measured with inter- and inner-differences among them. A downtrend in efficiency is found for all four regions with efficiency value the biggest for the East, bigger for the Northeast, less for the West and the least for the Central. The above quantitative analysis is helpful when new policies are established to improve environmental efficiency of each province in the future.