Efficiency Evaluation and Influencing Factors of Government Financial Expenditure on Environmental Protection: An SBM Super-efficiency Model Based on Undesired Outputs

In recent years, the adoption of the precise approach for coordinating socio-economic growth and environmental protection to attain sustainable development has become an urgent challenge to be addressed in China. The current development of environmental governance and the efficiency of government financial expenditure on environmental protection (EPEE) deserves enormous attention. With the aid of the provincial panel data, this study emphasized on the use of the SBM super-efficiency model based on unexpected output to quantify the efficiency of China’s government expenditure on environmental protection from 2013-2018 and constructed the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression model to investigate the influencing factors of the government expenditure on environmental protection. The results of the efficiency measurement portray that the aggregate EPEE in China is unsatisfactory. The efficiency value for the western region is greater than that of the central and eastern regions, while the values obtained from the eastern region are above that of the central region. Population size and urbanization level have negative implications on the efficiency value, while the regional economic development level positively promotes the efficiency of the government expenditure on environmental protection. Finally, the corresponding countermeasures and suggestions for policy implementation are outlined accordingly.