Effect of International Technology Transfer on the Technical Efficiency of High-Tech Manufacturing in China: A RAGA-PP-SFA Analysis

The sustainable development of China’s high-tech manufacturing (HTM) sector is restricted by dependence on technology introduction and foreign direct investment (FDI), low input-output efficiency, and environmental pollution. This study aimed to examine the roles of technology introduction and FDI in improving the technical efficiency of Chinese HTM from an environmental perspective. By integrating stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and projection pursuit (PP) based on the real-coded accelerated genetic algorithm (RAGA), this study constructed a RAGA-PP-SFA model that considers undesirable outputs. This model includes various outputs, including environmental pollution, in the production function to improve estimation accuracy. Moreover, to verify the robustness of the estimation results, the results were provided when environmental pollutants were taken as input factors. The results showed that technology introduction could significantly promote HTM’s technical efficiency, while FDI had no significant positive effect. By comparing the estimated results with those that did not consider environmental pollution, this study not only reveals different roles of technology introduction and FDI in improving HTM’s technical efficiency but also confirms that ignoring environmental pollution will overestimate their roles (especially the role of FDI) in such improvement.