Eco-Efficiency and Its Evolutionary Change under Regulatory Constraints: A Case Study of Chinese Transportation Industry
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This manuscript measures the eco-efficiency using a modified DEA model and employed an empirical analysis on the transportation industry of Chinese provinces. This work is sufficient. However, there are still some comments or suggestions as follows.
1. Acronyms should be avoided in the abstract.
2. For some data, the authors did not give specific sources or references, such as “China Statistical Yearbook” in the introduction.
3. The introduction section lacks logic and continuity. The authors failed to point out the importance, significance, as well as innovations of this paper's research.
4. In Section 4, the references refer to variable selection need to be added properly.
5. How are the two policy scenarios characterized in the process of empirical study?
6. In Figure 2, it is mentioned that " the eco-efficiency of Chinese transportation industry experienced a slight increase during 2015-2016 and a sharp decline during 2016-2017, and it continued to rise since year 2017." What are the reasons for the change?
7. The authors need to suggest future recommendation that is practically applicable and helpful for countries understudies, instead of proposing the general recommendation.
Author Response
Please see our responses in the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper evaluates eco-efficiency of China’s transport industry at the provincial level across time considering environmental regulation. It uses DDF in combination with DEA framework to measure eco-efficiency. It also measured productivity using Malmquist-Luenberger index. The model is solid. The results provide the latest measurement of transport efficiency in China. Overall, I would recommend a major revision. The detailed comments are as follows:
- You measured eco-efficiency from 2015-2020, but you did not mention any thing about 2020 in abstract when the COVID-19 pandemic started, and when the eco-efficiency should have dropped a lot. That’s weird to me.
- The authors claimed in the Abstraction that “The empirical results verify the practicability of our measurement models and the conclusions can be adopted in guiding the formulation of corresponding policies and regulations.” What kind of “practicality” is verified? What kind of “guidance and regulations” can be guided by your results? Please be more specific.
- “Currently, environmental efficiency or eco-efficiency evaluation has become one of the hot topics in the academia, and many different evaluation methods were used, such as multi-attribute decision-making (MADM), analytic hierarchy process (AHP), stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), and data envelopment analysis (DEA).” Please add references.
- Table 4, the result for Beijing is very very strange. How could “Beijing greatly increased its fixed asset investment in 2017 and 2018, together with the lack of significant improvement in transport capacity, leading to the reduction of eco-efficiency.”? I don’t understand. If there is no capacity expansion, where did all those money go? Besides, Beijing’s efficiency never come back since then. What’s more astonishing is that COVID has no impact on efficiency? This does not make sense to me. Please give more, deep explaination.
- Please consider polishing the writing with professional editing service.
- Please consider latest references
o Y. Choi, H. Wang, F. Yang, H. Lee. Sustainable Governance of the Korean Freight Transportation Industry from an Environmental Perspective. Sustainability 2021, 13 (11), 6429.
o F. Yang, Y. Choi, H. Lee. Life-cycle data envelopment analysis to measure efficiency and cost-effectiveness of environmental regulation in China’s transport sector. Ecological Indicators 2021, 126, 107717
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear Author/s,
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read your paper. The paper “Eco-efficiency and its evolutionary change under regulatory constraints: A case study of Chinese transportation industry” is interesting for journal readers. But following changes should be done before the consideration to improve the quality of the paper:
#Abstract should have at least one sentence per each: context and background, motivation, hypothesis, methods, results, conclusions. Need to reorganize…
1. The introduction part of the study needs improvement and story flow and the authors need to give proper contributions to their study.
2. There is a need to do a more rigorous and systematic literature review. The authors should clearly mention the literature gap. See following paper at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2021.102313
3. The authors have only presented the findings, with no explanation of their economic reasoning. Do these findings validate or disprove the current policy framework? Are any new policy measures planned as a result of the findings? Discussion of the findings, which is conspicuously absent here, is meant to spark debate on policy. If the results don't offer anything new in terms of theory or policy, then a simple comparison with the literature won't prove their originality.
4. It would be appropriate to indicate future research directions and limitations of this at the end of the conclusion section just before references.
5. Need to detail discussion
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
After a lot of modification and adjustment by the authors, the quality of this paper has been greatly improved. As for the authors’ comments, the responses are good and an in-depth answer is given, so accepting to publish the article is suggested.
Reviewer 2 Report
Please don't use fix-asset investment as the proxy for capital formation in your future research. It explains little about the role of capital in production.
Reviewer 3 Report
I am ok with changes
