Cooperation and competition among urban agglomerations in environmental efficiency measurement: A cross-efficiency approach

Environmental efficiency has become a key indicator in describing the capacity of regional resource utilization with consideration of the negative externality to nature. Notably, with the development of urban agglomerations all over the world, the role and strategy of efficiency measurement for cities should be reorganized to deal with the complex relationships among cities based on urban agglomerations. In this paper, we construct a set of data envelopment analysis (DEA) models based on a peer-evaluation mode with consideration to the cooperative relationships among cities within the same urban agglomeration together with the competitive relationships between different urban agglomerations. Then, this paper we analyze the environmental efficiency of 48 Chinese mainland cities belonging to the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Urban Agglomeration (BTHUA), Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomerations (YRDUA), and Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GHMGBA). This was accomplished during 2014 to 2019 by using four inputs, two desirable outputs, and two undesirable outputs. The results of efficiency scores indicate that the environmental efficiency trend increased during the time series from 2014 to 2019 while the difference on environmental efficiency among different cities and urban agglomerations are significant. The BTHUA is the best performing urban agglomeration with much higher environmental efficiency scores in all the years. Besides, this paper selected 11 influencing factors based on three different angles to analyze the internal and external environments to environmental efficiency scores for providing further inspiration to managers.