Assessing ecological efficiency of Zhejiang Province — From the perspective of circular economy innovation

Ecological efficiency is an analysis instrument for circular economy and sustainability, which indicates how efficient the economic activity is with regard to nature's goods and services. This paper estimates the eco-efficiency of cities in Zhejiang Province, China. Eco-efficiency is firstly assessed by using conventional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques. However conventional DEA-related ranking approaches are on the basis of self-evaluation, so the calculated efficiencies have little meaning as ranking base. Therefore a ranking technique based on the weight set is advanced. The approaches are applied to the problem of measuring the eco-efficiency of 11 cities in Zhejiang Province, the Yangtze River Delta Region from 2005-2008 by using real data.