Evaluation of Chinese provincial ecological well-being performance based on the driving effect decomposition

The focus of this paper is three-fold. First, it recalculates the HDI and EFI, use the ratio of HDI and EF to build the EWP, then evaluate and analyze the EWP of China's provinces. Second, it develops a unique ecological well-being performance (EWP) model, which is divided into two driving effects: the well-being effect of economic growth and the ecological efficiency of economic growth. Third, using the Human Development Index (HDI), it measures the well-being effect and ecological efficiency of economic growth in 31 Chinese provinces. Based on the EWP results, it divides the Chinese provinces into five types from economic leading and upgrading to overall descending. The research results show that China's HDI has greatly improved from 2006 to 2016, displaying a trend of "Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai take the lead in upgrading, and then the uprising trend expands from east to west". However, during the same period from 2006 to 2016, the growth rate of China's people’s well-being was significantly lower than that of per capita ecological footprint (EF), and the overall EWP declined. China's growth in people’s well-being is decoupled from economic growth, which indicates that China’s rapid economic growth was not followed by a similar progress in China’s people’s well-being. The above results suggest that China's total factor productivity (TFP) and green total factor productivity (GTFP) were improving but in different degrees during the above period. Other results show that, the carbon footprint has always been the largest component of China's EF, and the GTFP has always been lower than the TFP. According to the technology progress index and scale efficiency driving of change index, China’s provinces mainly focus on provincial TFP rather than GTFP. This paper suggests that the different types of provinces should adopt different strategies to improve their EWP in order to promote high-quality economic development.