Improve energy use efficiency through free trade policy: evidence from the establishment of free trade zones in China.

In the context of increasing global resource and environmental problems, it is of great practical significance to accurately test the impact of various factors on energy use efficiency for maintaining national energy security and formulating relevant policies. This paper measures firms' total factor energy efficiency (TFEE) using the two-stage stochastic frontier method within the data envelopment analysis (DEA) framework, leveraging data from listed firms in China spanning 2010 to 2022. Employing the establishment of free trade zones (FTZs) as a quasi-natural experiment, we apply the staggered differences-in-differences (DID) and stacked DID methods and analyze the impact of FTZs on firms' TFEE. The results show that the establishment of FTZs significantly promotes the improvement of firms' TFEE, and it has a greater promotion effect on heavily polluting, non-manufacturing, state-owned, private, and small-scale firms. The results of the mechanistic analysis showed that the promotion effect of FTZs on firms' TFEE is mainly realized through three channels: increasing government subsidies, reducing the financing constraint effect, and encouraging the technology innovation effect. Furthermore, industry-level decomposition results indicate that the surge in industry energy efficiency primarily results from improvements within firms rather than inter-industry variations. This paper's results propose that countries can enhance energy efficiency by progressively endorsing the implementation of FTZs.

The Heterogeneity of High-Quality Economic Development in China's Mining Cities: A Meta Frontier Function.

The transformation of mining cities and the realization of high-quality economic development are complicated processes. The objective existence of abundant resource factor endowment in mining cities does not mean that resource allocation is in the optimal state and can play the greatest role. The optimal allocation of factors for the high-quality economic development of mining cities is more important than the resource factors. The input-output allocation efficiency of high-quality economic development under the common frontier and group frontier of 99 mining cities in China from 2006 to 2019 is calculated by using the data envelopment analysis method and common frontier model, and the pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency are decomposed. The results show that (1) the comprehensive technical efficiency values under both common frontiers and group frontiers show that the factor allocation efficiency in the process of high-quality economic development of different mining cities shows obvious heterogeneity. (2) The growth of the input-output allocation efficiency of the high-quality economic development of mining cities has significant spatial convergence characteristics, but the convergence speed is different. (3) The high-quality development path of the mining city's economy should not only focus on comprehensively improving the ability of resource element input and output allocation but also improve the group environment.

Transformation of pollution control and green development: Evidence from China's chemical industry.

The Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan (APCP) is an important pollution control policy formulated by the Chinese government to promote green development. However, there are few studies of its impact. Based on a province-level panel dataset from 2007 to 2017, we use a three-hierarchy meta-frontier slack-based data envelopment analysis (SBM-DEA) model and the global Malmquist (GM) index to estimate the green total factor productivity (GTFP) of China's chemical sub-industries. Next, we use the difference-in-differences (DID) method to explore the effect of the implementation of the APCP in 2013 on the GTFP of China's chemical industry. We find an increasing trend in the GTFP of China's chemical industry between 2007 and 2017. A decomposition of the change in GTFP shows that technical progress was the main driving factor and management inefficiency was the main inhibitory factor. The APCP had a significant positive effect on GTFP. Overall, in the post-implementation period, the increase in the GTFP of the treatment group was approximately 7.9% greater than in the control group. The APCP also significantly improved the technical efficiency change index. A dynamic effect analysis shows that the positive effect of the APCP on GTFP had an inverted U-shaped trend. A series of robustness tests, including counterfactual, re-grouping, and quasi-DID tests, suggest that our findings are reliable. In addition, changes in exports, capital deepening, and energy prices all significantly improved the GTFP of China's chemical industry.

Hospital Efficiency: Concept, Measurement Techniques and Review of Hospital Efficiency Studies

In a time of rising demands on hospital reimbursement levels, focus on efficient operations is becoming more imperative. In health care systems, the measurement of efficiency is usually the first step in auditing individual performance of production units, e.g. hospitals, health centers, etc. It constitutes the rational framework for the distribution of human and other resources between and within health care facilities. The term efficiency is broadly used in economics and refers to the best utilization of resources in production. Typical example of efficiency is technical efficiency, referring to the effective use of resources in producing outputs. In the Farrell framework, a hospital is judged to be technically efficient if it is operating on the best practice production frontier in its hospital industry. In general, there are two main frontier methods in measuring efficiency. The first is Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a linear programming method which enables the measurement of efficiency consistent with the theoretically based concept of production efficiency. DEA typically examines the relationship between inputs to a production process and the outputs of that process. The second technique for assessing efficiency that is employed is Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). This is an econometric technique to estimate a conventional function; with the difference being that efficiency is measured using the residuals from the estimated equation. The error term is therefore divided into a stochastic error term and a systematic inefficiency term.