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When a developing country is undergoing a rapid growth period, agricultural wastewater, domestic wastewater, industrial wastewater, and organic matter content in chemical oxygen demand (COD) usually increase in great amounts, causing environmental pollution. Thus, this paper proposes a summary of factors to assess the performance of wastewater discharge costs. Total fixed assets, population growth, and wastewater treatment expenses in various regions of China were used as input factors, while gross regional product, discharged wastewater, and discharged COD were used as output factors. We employed the directional distance function (DDF) method to compare 31 regions of China between 2011 and 2015. The results showed that areas with leading economic development and areas with a small population and vast natural land have good wastewater treatment efficiency. In the past five years, economic development and wastewater treatment expense efficiency in Chongqing have been improving, such that by the end of 2015, this region efficiency was approaching frontier efficiency. We also found that the efficiency of wastewater treatment expense in many areas often falls below 0.6, which is still very low. There is, thus, a large gap between the regions and the leading frontier regions, meaning that the efficiency of wastewater treatment expense needs to be improved.

China is the world's largest energy consumer, and coal accounts for a higher proportion of the country's total energy consumption, yet during its 12th five‐year plan (2011–2015), the coal share among total energy consumption significantly decreased. Previous studies exploring energy performance typically used energy consumption as an input, but this lacks the analytical capacity for the structure of energy consumption. Thus, this study splits energy input into two different inputs, coal consumption and non‐coal energy consumption, and based on their differences with other variables, uses the hybrid dynamic data envelopment analysis model to assess the energy performance of China's provincial industrial sector during the period 2011 to 2015. We then compare coal consumption's and non‐coal consumption's rooms for improvement and conclude that provinces in eastern and central China should reduce the amount of coal consumption, thereby improving energy performance. Conversely, provinces in the western region should target a balance between energy utilization efficiency and coal consumption.

China is the world's largest energy consumer and carbon emitter, but despite unbalanced growth among the eastern, central, and western regions, local financial expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection has increased from 255.1 billion yuan in 2011 to 582.5 billion yuan in 2018. This research thus introduces financial expenditure like a new input into a dynamic meta-frontier non-radial directional distance function to evaluate China's energy and carbon emission efficiency over that period of time. Different from previous studies, after considering financial expenditure we find that most provinces have narrowed their gap with the benchmark frontier, reflecting that increasing financial expenditure does help improve energy and carbon emission efficiency. The results highlight that most provinces should increase their financial expenditure on energy conservation and environmental protection, especially in the central and western regions, so as to narrow their technology gap with the eastern region.

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