Cross Efficiency Assessment of China's marine economy under environmental governance

Abstract This paper aims to assess the green efficiency of marine economy in 11 coastal regions over 2002–2016. An improved cross efficiency model incorporating undesirable outputs is proposed, which can simultaneously consider self-appraisal and peer-appraisal. The model extends the traditional cross efficiency method by introducing undesirable outputs in a governance framework. The results show that there is still a gap to cover before becoming a high-quality development. While the efficiency exhibits a fluctuating upward trend in most regions, which highlights that the environmental governance has achieved a certain success. The geographic spatial distribution of 11 coastal regions of China indicates center diffusion mode drive the development of marine economy. The kernel density estimation analysis further demonstrates that the trends of green cross efficiencies of marine economy take on the forms of “unimodal, multimodal, unimodal” over three periods, which indicate the effects of China's environmental policies.