The Hierarchy and Transition of China's Urban Energy Efficiency

Urban energy efficiency has attracted lots of interests by city governors and researchers. Each city planner eagers to find effective ways to make city cleaner and more energy-efficient. The general approach of self-development is to learn from a model city or benchmark city. Thus, researchers are faced with the challenges of providing methods to identify such benchmark cities and paths to make improvement. This paper focused on urban energy efficiency hierarchy identification and level transition analysis by suggesting a novel application of multi-level frontiers DEA technique, using 49 China's environmental protection model cities data as example. Considering undesirable outputs such as PM2.5 and SO2, this paper evaluates urban energy efficiency first. Accordingly, a four-grade city energy efficiency structure can be recognized. The outcome of multi-level frontiers DEA analysis has also uncovered energy efficiency improvement chain of each city in different hierarchy. By constructing a set of four Ordered Probit Models at the end, this paper indicates that such hierarchy attributes to several influential factors such as population and energy technology. Through the analysis of this paper, the detection of rich details of underlying urban energy efficiency would be the basal step toward energy-efficient city research. Moreover, this framework for efficiency hierarchy and transition analysis or its extension can be applied to other data sets or other efficiency research in future.