Efficiency evaluation of the forest sector in China: A meta-frontier DEA approach

Evaluating forest resource performance supports sustainable development goals. Considering regional heterogeneity, this study develops an improved meta-frontier SBM model to assess forest performance. The improved meta-frontier SBM model effectively handles regional heterogeneity caused by differences in forest resource endowments and overcomes both the issue of infeasible targets and the problem of unreasonable technology gap ratio (TGR) values in non-radial meta-frontier approach, thus providing meaningful information (such as meta-efficiency, group efficiency, and TGR) to guide the development of effective policies to improve performance. This study's empirical results indicate that forest performance was not equalized among the provinces over the study period. Specifically, with some provinces, such as Chongqing consistently achieved the maximum group efficiency score of 1.000 and some consistently performing worse. In the two areas analyzed, non-forest rich areas demonstrated rapid technological improvement, with the TGR increasing from 0.639 in 2016 to 0.883 in 2020. Additionally, we found that the traditional TGR model underestimates the value of the technology gap in provinces compared to the proposed model. Finally, improvement strategies are proposed for inefficient provinces to enhance management efficiency and reduce regional technology gaps.