Study of Haze Emission Efficiency Based on New Co-opetition DEA

As haze intensifies in China, controlling haze emission has become a top priority in the country’s environment protection endeavor. Since haze moves across different regions, it is necessary to develop a DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) model underpinned by both competition and cooperation to evaluate the haze emission efficiency in different provinces. This study innovatively adopts the spatial econometrics to construct the co-opetition matrices of Chinese provinces, then builds the co-opetition DEA model that evaluates the haze emission efficiency of them, and finally uses the haze data for 2015 as an example to assess the applicability of the model. The results of the study include: First, compared with the traditional CCR model, this study constructs the co-opetition DEA cross-efficiency model that integrates haze’s feature of cross-border moving, and is thus more in line with the reality of haze emission and movement. Second, compared with the efficiency value gained using the CCR model, the haze emission efficiency values for Tianjin and Guangdong, two decision-making units, register greater variance when using the DEA model. The reason might lie in that they have a different spatial transportation relationship with their surrounding provinces. Third, the haze emission efficiency of provinces, resulting from the evaluation based on the co-opetition DEA method, varies greatly: those with high efficiency are mostly inland provinces that have a slow-growing economy and adverse climatic conditions, while many of the provinces that have low efficiency are located in the relatively prosperous east China. The specific co-opetition DEA model constructed in this study enriches the research on the DEA model, which can be applied to the emission efficiency evaluation of similar pollutants that cross the border and can contribute empirical support to the haze reducing efforts of the government with its empirical results.