Spatial Differences of Ecological Well-Being Performance in the Poyang Lake Area at the Local Level

Abstract

Maintaining low ecological consumption and high well-being while making economic progress and thus achieving sustainable development is a significant issue facing the world today. Ecological well-being performance (EWP) is one indicator that tracks this progress. Although EWP has been typically assessed at the national, provincial and urban levels, investigations into EWP units in the Great Lakes region are lacking. This study applied the two-stage super-efficiency slack-based measure (Super-NSBM) model and DEA window analysis to evaluate the EWP and sub-stage efficiency in the Poyang Lake (largest freshwater lake in China) area and analyzed its spatial differences at the local level. Redundancy analysis was conducted to explore the EWP improvement paths of different counties in the Poyang Lake region and Dagum’s Gini coefficient was applied to clarify the policy priorities of coordinated regional development. Results showed that the EWP of the Poyang Lake area presents an improving trend from 2007 to 2019, although the overall level is still low. The Poyang Lake area mainly faces the incongruity of ecological and economic development, which is the main reason for the low overall level of EWP. Excessive resource input and severe environmental pollution are common in most counties, but the focus of measures to improve EWP differs from county to county. The expansion of spatial differences in eco-economic efficiency leads to the spatial differences of EWP in the Poyang Lake area being still apparent at the local level. Reducing inter-basin disparities while alerting the widening of intra-basin differences is the policy focus for the future coordinated development of the Poyang Lake area.

Spatio-Temporal Evolution and Influencing Factors of Ecological Well-Being Performance from the Perspective of Strong Sustainability: A Case Study of the Three Gorges Reservoir Area, China

“…Therefore, modeling methods based on the multi-input-multi-output perspective were born, including the stochastic frontier approach (SFA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods. For example, Xiao et [42,43]. However, the modeling approach has some drawbacks, such as multiple input and output indicators that may lead to problems in data acquisition and processing and limit its use to compare multiple countries and regions [36].…”

“…In addition, studies that use radial and non-radial epsilon-based measure (EBM) models are also rare. In the construction of the indicator system, only negative ecological inputs such as environmental pollution and resource consumption are usually considered, ignoring positive inputs such as capital [27,42]. At the same time, existing studies using DEA methods fail to address the problem of the small number of DMUs and too many input-output indicators, resulting in less accurate measurement results [50,51].…”

“…EWP is decomposed into two stages of realization to open the black box of the transformation process of ecological inputs and well-being outputs [42,44,52,53]. In the first stage, capital inputs are used as intermediate means to transform into undesired (environmental pollution) and desired (economic outputs) outputs through ecological inputs (resource consumption) [27,42].…”

“…EWP is decomposed into two stages of realization to open the black box of the transformation process of ecological inputs and well-being outputs [42,44,52,53]. In the first stage, capital inputs are used as intermediate means to transform into undesired (environmental pollution) and desired (economic outputs) outputs through ecological inputs (resource consumption) [27,42]. That is, eco-economic efficiency; in the second stage, the intermediate variables (economic outputs) are used as inputs transformed into integrated well-being outputs, that is, economic well-being efficiency.…”

“…Regarding ecological inputs, the current academic community mostly uses negative indicators such as environmental and resource categories to characterize ecological inputs [27,42]. In this paper, we argue that ecological inputs should also introduce some capitalbased positive indicators, which are helpful to comprehensively reflect regional EWP and beneficial for decision-making institutions to formulate corresponding policies.…”