Environmental regulation and green technical efficiency: A process-level data envelopment analysis from Chinese iron and steel enterprises

Based on the process-level micro data, this paper adopts the SBM model considering the undesirable output to calculate the green technical efficiency (GTE) of 31 Chinese iron and steel enterprises (CISEs) in 2008 and 2012 as well as the efficiency of three main production process in the steel production, such as sintering, ironmaking and steelmaking. Based on this, the correlation between different types of environmental regulation and the GTE of CISEs is further discussed. The results show that: (1) Compared with sintering and ironmaking, the GTE of steelmaking process is relatively low, which is the short board that affects the improvement of GTE of CISEs. And it's also found that most enterprises have at least one short board production process (that is, GTE is relatively low). (2) There are regional differences and ownership differences in GTE of CISEs. Specifically, the GTE of CISEs in southern China was higher than that in northern China in 2008 and 2012. The GTE of state-owned steel enterprises in 2008 was slightly higher than that of private steel enterprises, but in 2012, the GTE of private steel enterprises was significantly higher than that of state-owned steel enterprises. (4) Different types of environmental regulation have positive effects on the overall GTE of CISEs, but the impact on the production process is heterogeneous. The command-and-control environmental regulation has a significant positive effect on sintering process, while market incentive environmental regulation has a significant positive effect on ironmaking process.