Spatial-temporal characteristics of industrial land green efficiency in China: Evidence from prefecture-level cities

In the context of the construction of an ecologically sustainable civilization and green development, the continuous improvement in industrial land green use has played an important role in China. Only a few studies have evaluated industrial land-use efficiency from the perspective of ecological economy. Considering energy consumption and undesirable outputs simultaneously, this study evaluated the industrial land green efficiency (ILGE) of 198 cities in China from 2007 to 2015 using the Slacks-based Measure (SBM)-Undesirable model, and spatial convergence methods were used to analyze the trend of ILGE. The study found clear regional differences in ILGE. The average ILGE in the eastern region was much higher than that in the central and western regions. From a temporal perspective, the average ILGE in all cities has gradually decreased since 2007 and fell to its lowest value in 2013. However, the ILGE showed a continuous upward trend in the final two years. Most cities with high ILGE values appeared to be concentrated in the eastern region. Fifteen cities with scores of 1.00 accounted for 8.6% of the total, indicating that they are the most efficient in the sample over all the years studied. Heilongjiang Province had the lowest ILGE, with 75% of the cities located in the lowest 30 places of the ILGE ranking. The national, eastern, and central regions showed an unstable short-term characteristic of sigma-convergence since 2013. Absolute and conditional beta-convergence existed in all regions, indicating that cities with poorer efficiency have a faster ILGE growth rate than leading cities.