Regional unified environmental efficiency of China: a non-separable hybrid measure under natural and managerial disposability

Attributing to the booming industry, China has made huge economic achievements during recent decades/years. However, the issue of energy and environment has challenged the sustainable development of the industry a lot in China. Investigating the non-separable relationship among energy, capital, and CO2 emission under natural and managerial disposability, this paper proposes two hybrid measure approaches to measure unified environmental efficiency of industry in China during 2011–2016. Besides, production efficiency, emission efficiency, damage to scale, and return to scale of 30 regions in China are calculated and recognized. The results show that (1) unified environmental efficiency of Chinese industry under natural disposability is higher than that under managerial disposability in early few years, but they are close to each other finally. (2) Unified environmental efficiency gaps among regions under natural disposability are wider than those under managerial disposability. Increasing capital investment and improving technology can help reduce efficiency gaps among regions. (3) It is available to increase production efficiency and reduce CO2 emission by cutting down energy consumption for most regions; insufficient capital investment and poor production technology cause the decreasing return to scale and production efficiency.