Under the pressure of environmental deterioration, green economic development has become an effective way for countries to solve economic and environmental problems, and scientific assessment of green economic efficiency is important to realize sustainable development. In this study, based on the panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2011 to 2022, we first used the super efficiency SBM model to assess the green economic efficiency of each province. Then, we analyzed the spatial and temporal evolutional characteristics of the green economic efficiency by using methods such as kernel density estimation and Theil index. Finally, we used the geographically and temporally weighted regression model to analyze the issue of provincial-level heterogeneity of the influencing factors. The results of the study showed that China's overall green economy efficiency demonstrated an upward trend but with low values, and a shift was observed from multilevel differentiation to polarization. Spatially, it showed a contiguous block distribution with notable east-west differences. Economic development had the greatest impact on green economic efficiency, and the positive impacts of economic development, population density, and financial expenditure on green economic efficiency were more obvious, while the negative impacts of trade openness, energy intensity, and environmental regulation were more obvious.
Dong et al. (Fri,) studied this question.