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.