Large-Scale Land Use for Construction and Energy Consumption after the New Millennium with Their Impact on Total-Factor Efficiency Change in China’s Regional Economy

The rapid economic growth after the new millennium could be characterized by the reappearance of heavy industrialization and land urbanization. In the literatures, extensive studies have examined the impact of energy and emissions on the growth quality during the heavy industrialization process, but few have paid attention to the land dimension. This paper aims at studying the role of land use in changing the total-factor efficiency (TFE) in China’s regional economy, together with the energy factors. The basic conclusions obtained are as follows: (1) the land and energy factors do have a statistically significant influence on the total-factor integrated efficiency (TFIE), leading to a much lower and not improved efficiency performance in the sample period. The integrated efficiency is dominated by the land factor rather than energy ones; and (2) the total-factor land efficiency (TFLE) is lower than the energy efficiency and has more room to improve. The land factor has a statistically significant influence on the total-factor energy efficiency (TFEE) but not vice versa. As compared to single-factor efficiency, the total-factor energy/land efficiency provides us a more precise measure of factor efficiency in China.