Dynamic evaluation on the energy and environmental performance of China's transportation sector: a ZSG-MEA window analysis

The transportation sector is one of the important energy consumption and carbon emission sources. This paper extends the multi-directional efficiency analysis (MEA) to zero-sum game MEA (ZSG-MEA) with considering the CO2 emission as a fixed-sum undesirable output to measure the energy and environmental performance (EEP) of the transportation sector. The ZSG-MEA window analysis is applied to dynamically evaluate the EEP of China's transportation sector in 30 provincial-level regions during 2008-2017. Some interesting findings are obtained: (i) the EEP of the transportation sector in most regions has not been performed well but the average EEP of the transportation sector in most regions has been gradually improved since 2011. A general trend is that the transportation sector in the east area wins the best average EEP, and the average EEP of the central area is better than that of the west area, but their gap is narrowing from 2012. (ii) The EEP fluctuation verifies the greatest imbalance of EEP among the east area's regions. Both the east area and the central area are narrowing the imbalance in recent years, but the west area has an inverse trend. (iii) The performance of CO2 emissions is better than that of energy consumption in all three areas, which implies that China's transportation sector seems to have paid more attention on emission reduction than energy conservation. Besides, the east area has the best performance of energy consumption and CO2 emissions from an overall perspective. And the energy consumption and CO2 emissions in the central area perform better than the west area before 2013, but then shows an entangled state from 2013. (iv) From the average variable specific ZSG-MEA efficiency, the industrial added value of transportation sector performs better than other variables in the east area and central area, but the situation in the west area is inverse. Some useful insights are provided according to these findings.

Automated summary

This study extends the multi-directional efficiency analysis to evaluate the energy and environmental performance of China's transportation sector in 30 provincial-level regions during 2008-2017. The findings show that the transportation sector in the east area performs the best, followed by the central area, and the west area performs the worst. CO2 emissions perform better than energy consumption, indicating that China's transportation sector pays more attention to emission reduction rather than energy conservation.