Assessment of the efficiency of coupling sustainable well-being in mountain villages: A case study of Qinba Mountain Areas in China

Under the global Sustainable Development Goals initiative, the quest for wellbeing is also gradually shifting from wealth to sustainable development, requiring a re-examination of the deeper linkages between regional economic, ecological, and social development and wellbeing. Enhancing sustainable wellbeing is the way for China to move from achieving of moderate prosperity to common prosperity. Based on this, this study takes 46 counties in the Qinba Mountain Areas region as the study area and uses the sustainable wellbeing index as the desired output, and conducts performance evaluation and enhancement path research through the DEA method. The following research conclusions were mainly obtained, (1) There is a mismatch between the input elements and output elements of sustainable well-being in the Qinba Mountain areas, and the management technology is the main constraint on the technological progress index; (2) the differences in the GML index are relatively small, and the optimization and growth of the performance level can be achieved by adjusting only about 1.02% of the input-output relationship; (3) there is an obvious shortage of input elements, in which 87% of the counties have economic capital insufficiency, about 76% of counties have cropland insufficiency and incipient ecological land occupation, and 41% of counties have social capital insufficiency. Instead, ecological land redundancy which is needed to improve performance levels. In order to solve these problems, it is necessary to strengthen the level of sustainable management in each county in terms of ecological, economic, and social integration, to continue to promote capital investment in the mountain economy in order to raise the level of the economy, to strictly use cropland and optimize the land-use structure, and to strengthen the level of social governance in order to raise the level of satisfaction of the residents, so as to raise the level of sustainable wellbeing.