Search Results (3)

Since the inauguration of the government-led five year economic plans in the 1960s, Korea has achieved remarkable economic development. Korea’s economic strategy, known as ‘The Miracle on the Han River’, focused on heavy and chemical industries such as ship building and petrochemicals and was based on resource intensive urbanization. This rapid urban development caused a series of problems, such as over-development in urban areas, bottlenecks in utilities, and environmental degradation. Nevertheless, the Korean government has recently moved toward deregulation of the greenbelts of major city areas. Since very few studies have analyzed the urban land use economic efficiency (ULUEE) in Korea, this paper assesses the feasibility of recent deregulation policy concerning the greenbelts utilizing the sequential slack-based measure (SSBM) model under environmental constraints across 16 South Korean cities from 2006 to 2013. Our research makes three significant contributions to urbanization research. First, this paper uses an SSBM model to analyze the dynamic changes of urban land use economic efficiency in Korea at the regional level; Second, this paper analyzes factors influencing ULUEE in Korea, and the feasibility of the deregulation policies on the greenbelts; Third, this paper suggests more performance-oriented policy alternatives to improve the ULUEE and implement sustainable greenbelt management. Full article

Using a sequential slack-based measure (SSBM) model, this paper analyzes the spatiotemporal disparities of urban land use economic efficiency (ULUEE) under environmental constraints, and its influencing factors in 270 cities across China from 2003–2012. The main results are as follows: (1) The average ULUEE for Chinese cities is only 0.411, and out of the 270 cities, only six cities are always efficient in urban land use in the study period. Most cities have a lot of room to improve the economic output of secondary and tertiary industries, as well as environmental protection work; (2) The eastern region of China enjoys the highest ULUEE, followed by the western and central regions. Super-scale cities show the best performance of all four city scales, followed by large-scale, small-scale and medium-scale cities. Cities with relatively developed economies and less pollutant discharge always have better ULUEE; (3) The results of slack variables analysis show that most cities have problems such as the labor surplus, over-development, excessive pollutant discharge, economic output shortage, and unreasonable use of funds is the most serious one; (4) The regression results of the influencing factors show that improvements of the per capita GDP and land use intensity are helpful to raise ULUEE. The urbanization rate and the proportion of foreign enterprises’ output account for the total output in the secondary and tertiary industries only have the same effect in some regions and city scales. The land management policy and land leasing policy have negative impact on the ULUEE in all the three regions and four city scales; (5) Some targeted policy goals are proposed, including the reduction of surplus labor, and pay more attention to environmental protection. Most importantly, effective implementation of land management policies from the central government, and stopping blind leasing of land to make up the local government’s financial deficit would be very helpful to improve the ULUEE of Chinese cities. Full article

Improving energy efficiency has been widely regarded as one of the most cost-effective ways to improve sustainability and mitigate climate change. This paper presents a sequential slack-based efficiency measure (SSBM) application to model total-factor energy efficiency with undesirable outputs. This approach simultaneously takes into account the sequential environmental technology, total input slacks, and undesirable outputs for energy efficiency analysis. We conduct an empirical analysis of energy efficiency incorporating greenhouse gas emissions of Korean power companies during 2007–2011. The results indicate that most of the power companies are not performing at high energy efficiency. Sequential technology has a significant effect on the energy efficiency measurements. Some policy suggestions based on the empirical results are also presented. Full article