Assessing the environmental management efficiency of manufacturing sectors: evidence from emerging economies

Environmental management in the Chinese manufacturing industry has attracted global attention. Using environmental indicator data from 2001 to 2010 for this industry, we empirically examine its environmental management efficiency using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Hierarchical Clustering methods. Our findings reveal that the environmental management of the Chinese manufacturing industry has more DEA inefficiency than efficiency. Environmental management efficiency showed a significant decline before 2004, but rapid growth since 2007. Our findings also indicate that there is input redundancy and output insufficiency in the manufacturing industry's environmental management from 2002 to 2004. In addition, we found that most manufacturing sectors in China had consistently inefficient environmental management over the 10 years under study. Overall, our findings reveal that efficiency remains low. Thus, the manufacturing industry's environmental management needs to improve from the perspective of enterprises and government. We hope that our study paves the way for future research into improving the manufacturing industry's environmental management in emerging countries.