Assessing the Static and Dynamic Efficiency of Digital Economy in China: Three Stage DEA–Malmquist Index Based Approach

The digital economy, a new economic form, has become an essential economic development engine in various countries. Recently, less research has been conducted on the efficiency of the digital economy, with the majority of studies instead concentrating on the industrial size of the digital economy. Therefore, to quantify and analyze the efficiency of China’s digital economy from 2013 to 2020 from both a static and dynamic perspective, this research utilized a three-stage DEA model and the Malmquist index. The findings demonstrated that after excluding external environmental factors, the scale efficiency value, integrated technical efficiency value, and pure technical efficiency value all significantly increased. This confirmed that external environmental factors uniquely influence the efficiency of the digital economy. The efficiency of the digital economy varies by location, with the eastern region tending to perform the best, and the central region tending to perform the worst. The efficiency decomposition results demonstrated that the positive growth trend of the efficiency of the digital economy is primarily due to technological advancement. Overall, there is a lot of room for growth in China’s digital economy. Each province and city should combine their own capabilities to accelerate digital construction.