Emission Reduction and Energy Performance Improvement with Different Regional Treatment Intensity in China

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

China’s industrial sector, which has a significant position in the world, is the main sector of China’s energy consumption and waste gas emission. China’s government has promulgated a Guiding Opinion, setting key regions to establish an emission reduction target of air pollutants during the 12th five year plan (2011–2015). Thus, there is a different regional treatment of industrial waste gas in China. This study considers the waste gas treatment expenditure as a new input and employs the non-radial directional distance function in the framework of the meta-frontier model to investigate the energy and emission reduction performance of China’s industrial sectors. The study is aimed at finding a significant and expanded technical gap between key and non-key regions in the energy and emission reduction efficiencies. The empirical result presents an effective method to improve the performance by increasing the emission treatment expenditure to reduce emissions.