Land use efficiency and technology gaps of urban agglomerations in China: An extended non-radial meta-frontier approach

With the rapid development of urban agglomerations (UAs), the contradiction between the shortage of land resources and the sustainable development has become increasingly apparent. Considering regional heterogeneity, this paper proposes a generalized non-radial meta-frontier DEA framework to measure the land use performance of 12 typical UAs covering 184 cities in China during 2006–2015. To be specific, this approach effectively avoids unreasonable technology gap ratio values in non-radial DEA models, and decomposes the land use performance loss into technology gaps and management inefficiency. The results show that 1) In terms of the efficiency values under meta-frontier, the land use performance of most UAs is relatively low, whereas the development of cities within each UA are balanced with high group efficiencies. 2) The technology levels of the 12 UAs are inconsistent, in which Yangtze River Delta UA equips with the most advanced technology while Southern Liaoning UA has the lowest technology level. 3) The improvement direction and potential efficiencies of cities also differ. Based on technical potential and management potential, the cities and UAs are divided into three categories. Finally, based on the assessment results, related policy implications to promote the land use performance of China's UAs are proposed.