Industrial energy-pollution performance of regions in China based on a unified framework combining static and dynamic indexes

Energy and environmental concerns have attracted more and more worldwide attention. As industrialization leads to serious environmental effects on sustainable development, China urgently needs to improve its energy-pollution performance without harming industrial growth. This paper proposes two indexes, the energy-pollution efficiency index and the energy-pollution productivity change index, in a unified framework that not only enables a more comprehensive analysis by simultaneously allowing for both static and dynamic performance evaluations, but also sets a sounder best target environmental effect by jointly considering energy conservation and pollution reduction. This research evaluates the industrial energy-pollution performance of regions in China during the period 1995-2014. Findings reveal that its energy-pollution efficiency was unbalanced and hovered at a low level, showing an urgent need for improvement; however, energy-pollution productivity did gradual increase and technology progress was its main contributor. Energy efficiency was higher than pollution efficiency, and their gap increased instead of narrowing. The east area's energy-pollution efficiency ranked first, while its regional discrepancy presented an increasing trend. Energy-pollution productivity improvement was mainly driven by technology progress, while efficiency change exhibited a negative effect. Finally, energy utilization contributed less to energy-pollution productivity improvement than pollution emissions.