AUTHOR=Chen Rui , Lu Haochun TITLE=PCA-SBM Model Green Urbanization Performance Assessment in China JOURNAL=Frontiers in Energy Research VOLUME=9 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/energy-research/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.637820 DOI=10.3389/fenrg.2021.637820 ISSN=2296-598X ABSTRACT=

China’s urbanization over the past thirty years has been the fastest in history and has led to significant challenges in balancing urbanization and energy use. As a result, this study proposed a comprehensive green urbanization assessment index system considering energy use and environment protection together. To be specific, principal component analysis was applied to eliminate redundant information, and a slacks-based measure model was used to evaluate urbanization efficiencies. Meanwhile, with super efficiency incorporated, the proposed model enabled to distinguish the DMU from DMUs with same efficiency value, further, a projection analysis was conducted to direct the improvement of the identified inefficient decision-making units (DMUs). Finally, the comprehensive green urbanization index system was applied to a western Chinese province (Sichuan Province) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models, from which it was found that the overall green urbanization efficiency in Sichuan province was 81.54%, due to an input distribution imbalance and low technical efficiency.