Does ‘Forage-Livestock Balance’ policy impact ecological efficiency of grasslands in China?

Sustainability Governance in China: An Analysis of Regional Ecological Efficiency

“…At present, the research on ecological efficiency mainly focuses on the application and measurement of ecological efficiency [20,21]. There are many indicators to measure ecological efficiency, such as carbon dioxide emission and sulfur dioxide emission.…”

“…These indicators are simple to calculate, and easy to understand and operate, but over-emphasize one factor's input and pollution emissions, which leads to the failure to reflect the substitution relationship between various resource inputs and pollution emissions in the production process, and the result of the efficiency measurement does not correlate with reality [22]. The use of indicators and models is the main method to evaluate ecological efficiency in more complex situations [21]. The quantitative estimation of ecological efficiency mainly follows the two directions of life-cycle assessment and DEA.…”

“…The index system of ecological efficiency analyzes the interaction between economy and environment [24]. The DEA model, as a multi-index to evaluate the relative effectiveness of decision-making units, is widely used in ecological efficiency analysis [21]. Deilmann et al [25] assessed the efficiency of land use using the DEA method.…”

“…Ecological efficiency output indicators measure the total value of products or services produced by regions. The core of ecological efficiency is to maximize economic output by reducing resource consumption and environmental pollution [21]. Therefore, regional gross domestic product (GDP) of each province was chosen to represent the added value of products and services.…”

Two-Stage Super-Efficiency Slacks-Based Model to Assess China’s Ecological Wellbeing

“…The DEA input-output model first proposed by Charnes et al [ 39 ] has been widely used for efficiency evaluations, including the EWP, for which the indicators included economic development, social welfare, resource consumption, environmental pollution, and others [ 40 ]. However, traditional DEA measurements based on radial features have been found to have inaccuracies as they ignore the slack variables [ 41 ], fail to take the undesirable outputs into consideration, and can overstate the efficiencies [ 42 ]. To overcome these limitations, Tone [ 43 ] proposed a slack-based measure model (SBM) that was able to obtain the slack degrees for each input-output indicator in a single-stage DEA efficiency evaluation.…”