Measurement and evaluation of Chinese regional energy efficiency based on provincial panel data

In recent years, two primary methods, the data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) have widely been applied to measure energy utilization efficiency as they both can estimate the energy efficiency appropriately. However, both of the methods have merits as well as drawbacks. In this paper we use the super efficiency of DEA (SEDEA) model and SFA to estimate the energy productive efficiency of 30 administrative regions of mainland China during the period 1998–2009. The comparative study of the two methods shows that despite the estimated values being quite different, the ranks of these two results are very similar. In addition, the results of the two methods suggest that energy efficiency in the eastern region of China possesses an advantage over the western regions. Further analysis indicates that SEDEA not only has the advantages of DEA and SFA, but also has the advantage of evaluation energy efficiency effectively. In addition, this paper decomposes the Malmquist index so as to explore energy efficiency comprehensively and dynamically.