Comprehensive Assessment of Regional Sustainability via Emergy, Green GDP and Dea: A Case Study in Guizhou Province, China

We propose a comprehensive eco-efficiency framework based on emergy theory, green gross domestic product (GGDP) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) to get a thorough assessment of regional sustainability.The paper evaluates the sustainable development of Guizhou Province from 2000 to 2017 based on emergy analysis, GGDP and DEA.Moreover, the GGDP, which has deducted the undesirable output, is selected as the output index to calculate the eco-efficiency of Guizhou Province and further evaluate its sustainable development level by the super-SBM model.The results showed that the growth rate of the GGDP in Guizhou Province was far lower than that of the GDP.The proportion of the GGDP in GDP showed a trend of continuous decline from 78.32% to 60.60% mainly due to the high consumption of non-renewable resource products.Moreover, there were seven effective years during 2000-2017.There was redundancy in capital input and labor input, and the input and output were not optimal in the ineffective years.Therefore, we suggest that Guizhou Province should achieve technological progress by introducing talents, perfect industrial layout, optimize the industrial structure, and gradually realize the transformation industry from high energy consumption, high emission and high pollution to low energy consumption, low emission and low pollution.