Evaluation of urban green development transformation process for Chinese cities during 2005-2016

Urban green development transformation (UGDT) has become a new direction for Chinese urban development in the 21st century. In this paper, firstly constructs an index system for dynamic assessment of UGDT based on resource consumption, economic development and social welfare, secondly propose a two-stage decomposition to further open the "black box" of UGDT process from the perspective of ecological welfare performance. This paper empirically investigates the evaluation and staged decomposition of the UGDT process in 286 cities of China over the period 2005-2016, and propose improvement paths based on this. Our results show that the UGDT of Chinese cities will gradually begin and be in a benign state of time after 2014. Moreover, find that low eco-economic efficiency (EE) is the main reason for the low level of overall CGDT in cities, and that the CGDT in regions has shown a trend of "the highest in the central, the second in the east, and the lowest in the west". Correspondingly, based on the principles of obvious "short board" priority improvement between green development and urban social welfare, this paper can explore the different improvement paths of CGDT in different cities. (c) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.