Sustainable efficiency and CO2 reduction potential of China’s construction industry: application of a three-stage virtual frontier SBM-DEA model

In this paper, a new three-stage virtual frontier SBM-DEA (Slacks-Based Measure of Efficiency in Data Envelopment Analysis) model is proposed to evaluate the sustainable efficiency of the construction industry. The relevant construction industry data of 30 Chinese PARs (provincial administrative regions) from 2011 to 2016 are brought into the model to calculate the sustainable efficiency of each administrative region and verify the rationality of the model. In order to solve the problem that the efficiency values of multiple effective decision units cannot be differentiated in traditional DEA model evaluation, the reference decision unit set and the evaluation decision unit set are respectively different sets in the virtual frontier SBM-DEA model. In the three-stage virtual frontier SBM-DEA, the reference decision unit set and evaluation decision unit set are two different sets that can distinguish among the effective decision units of DEA. The analysis results show that the average sustainable efficiency values of the construction industry in eastern, middle and western China exhibit a decreasing trend, at 0.643, 0.586 and 0.4830, respectively. Moreover, the technical equipment rate and external environmental factors play an important role in the sustainable efficiency of the construction industry and the CO2 emission reduction potential of most PARs shows a downward trend.