Hongwei Liu^ab, Qingyuan Zhu^a, Junfei Chu^a, Jie Wu*^a

(^a School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui Province 230026, PR China; ^b School of Business, Anhui University, Hefei, Anhui Province 230026, PR China; * is the corresponding author)

Abstract: As the second largest economic entity in the world, China plays an important role in controlling global CO₂ emissions. The land transportation sector (including railway transportation and road transportation) has been the most important source of emissions in China and the average CO₂ emissions of land transportation was 529.31 million tons during the period 2009-2012. In this study, a parallel Slack-Based Measure Data Envelopment Analysis model is proposed, which is used for evaluating the overall efficiency of the land transportation sector and individual efficiencies of the railway transportation and highway transportation subsectors at the same time, considering carbon dioxide emissions. The empirical results show the following: (a) only Anhui province was efficient each year during 2009-2012. (b) The environmental efficiency of the Eastern area in mainland China is the best, followed by the Central area, with the Western area being the worst. (c) The performance of railway transportation is better than that of highway transportation. These three conclusions lead to policy suggestions to promote highway transportation technological innovation and narrow the regional imbalances in land transportation. This paper makes two main contributions: the model advances improvements to methods used in the Data Envelopment Analysis technique, and also provides governments with a practical and yet easy-to-adopt perspective to implement land transportation performance measurement that aids in decision making.

Keywords: Data envelopment analysis; Land transportation sector; Railway transportation; Highway transportation; Resource and environmental efficiency