Innovation and environmental performance: An empirical study of 31 cities in China

After its rapid economic growth, China is facing a very serious problem of atmospheric pollution with major long-term atmospheric problems appearing in large cities. Air pollution not only affects people’s normal lives, but also has a greater negative impact on their bodies, causing diseases, impacting productivity, and influencing people’s creativity. Due to past articles, the discussion on the efficiency of innovation and research has not been considered the impact of environmental variables. This study combines energy consumption, economics, environmental variables and innovative research and development capabilities to analyze and explore the relationship between consumption, environment, economy, and innovative R&D capabilities, this is the feature of this article. This study employ the Dynamic Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model to calculate energy consumption efficiency, R&D input efficiency, innovation patent output efficiency, carbon dioxide emission efficiency, and AQI efficiency of each city and further compare each city to find their space for improvement. The results of the study show that 10 cities have a total efficiency score of 1, implying the improvement space is already 0, whereas the total efficiency scores of the other 21 cities mean there is still much room for improvement, and there are big differences among the cities.