Measuring environmental sustainability performance of freight transportation seaports in China: A data envelopment analysis approach based on the closest targets

Abstract

Because of China's rapid economic development, its freight transportation system has grown to become one of China's high‐pollution‐emission sectors. However, there are few studies that pay close attention to measuring and improving the environmental performance of China's freight transportation system, especially in regard to seaports. In this paper, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is applied to measure the environmental performance of freight transportation seaports. In addition, we also provide benchmarking information to point the way to improving environmental performance effectively. Our proposed DEA model is based on the closest targets, which satisfies the strong monotonicity and can yield the most relevant solution for the inefficient seaports. An empirical study of 21 of China's primary freight transportation seaports shows that most of them have relatively good environmental performance. Among the five coastal port groups, the Bohai‐rim port group had the best environmental performance, whereas the Pearl River port group had the worst. Our data show significant differences between the best and worst performances, indicating that more measures should be taken to balance and coordinate the development between the five coastal port groups.

Stepwise Improvement for Environmental Performance of Transportation Industry in China: A DEA Approach Based on Closest Targets

“…Besides, there are some scholars who analyzed the environmental performance of transportation subsectors, such as the railroad sectors [33,34], the airport transportation [35][36][37][38], the land transportation [22,39], and ports [20,40].…”

“…Various DEA models have been applied to the environmental performance evaluation of China's transportation industry (see [18][19][20][21][22]). However, the studies on the environmental performance improvement of the transportation industry are largely lacking.…”

New data envelopment analysis models for assessing sustainability Part 2: A static data envelopment analysis approach

“…The fourth article is entitled “Measuring environmental sustainability performance of freight transportation seaports in China: A data envelopment analysis approach based on the closest targets” is by Li, Li, Zhao, and Zhu (). In this article the authors propose a model to measure the environmental performance of freight transportation seaports in China.…”

Carbon emission abatement quota allocation in Chinese manufacturing industries: An integrated cooperative game data envelopment analysis approach

“…With the consideration of undesirable output b j for DMU j j ¼ 1; :::; n ð Þ ; a core task is identifying methods to handle undesirable outputs (Song et al, 2018). The existing research can be mainly divided into two groups in terms of disposability assumptions (Chen & Delmas, 2012;Li, Li, Zhao, & Zhu, 2018h;Song, An, Zhang, Wang, & Wu, 2012). The first group considers that the undesirable outputs are joint weakly or strongly disposable with desirable outputs, hence it adopts weak or strong disposability assumption (Seiford & Zhu, 2002;Zhou, Ang, & Wang, 2012).…”