Data envelopment analysis for sustainability evaluation in China: Tackling the economic, environmental, and social dimensions

This study develops a theoretical framework within the data envelopment analysis context to examine the efficiency of sustainable development systems. Such a system is composed of an economic and environmental subsystem and a social subsystem. We first explore the performances of the subsystems and the system under an independently parallel setting and then establish an operational linkage to study the noncooperative and cooperative interactions between the subsystems in a linked parallel setting. A case study of 30 major Chinese cities is presented to illustrate the feasibility of the approach and the results show great discrimination of system performances among the cities. The major cities have distinct geographic characteristics which affect their economic and environmental efficiency as well as the social efficiency. It was found that in some of these sustainable development systems, the subsystems behave inharmoniously, which results in significant inefficiency. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.