Assessing sustainability environmental performance of three urban agglomerations in China: An input–output modeling approach

Abstract As a special form of a cluster city, urban agglomeration has become an important platform to support national economic growth and to participate in international competition and cooperation, but it faces severe environmental problems. This research thus selects panel data of 60 cities in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration (BTH), Yangtze River Delta (YRD), and Pearl River Delta (PRD) from 2013 to 2017. Based on the input–output perspective, labor and energy consumption per GDP are selected as input indicators, GDP, PM2.5, SO2, industrial smoke and dust emissions, and wastewater discharged as output indicators, and fixed assets as a carry-over variable in the dynamic DEA model to evaluate and analyze the environmental efficiencies of these three urban agglomerations. Findings show that their total environmental efficiency exhibits a wave-like development trend, and that the total efficiency score of BTH is better than that of PRD and YRD. From the viewpoint of a sub-efficiency index, PM2.5 is the lowest in unexpected output, where its average five-year efficiency score is 0.9847, while the average score of industrial smoke and dust emissions efficiency is the lowest at 0.6199. Finally, this paper offers suggestions for different problems facing the three urban agglomerations.