Measuring China's regional inclusive green growth

In response to the increasing pressure of global resource management and environmental issues and a slowdown in the related economic growth, China has proposed an inclusive green growth strategy based on coordination between society, the economy, and the environment. The alignment of resources with the socio-economic development goals is a key issue that must be addressed for inclusive green growth. A comprehensive directional distance function and slacks-based measure model are proposed to evaluate the inclusive green growth levels of 285 cities in China from 2003 to 2015. The Luenberger indicator is used to decompose the drivers of inclusive green growth. Our research shows that the main obstacle to China's inclusive green growth is the magnitude of technical change, which is not aligned with China's green development level. Hence, it is necessary to coordinate overall inclusive green growth levels using both technical and regional aspects. This research provides a reference not only for China's economic green development, but also for that of developing countries, enabling the coordination of economic development and environmental resource protection.