Green Growth or Gray Growth: Measuring Green Growth Efficiency of the Manufacturing Industry in China

The manufacturing industry has created a rapid evolution of the economy, but it has also negatively impacted the ecosystem. A better understanding of the manufacturing industry in green growth is crucial to achieving the sustainability goals in China’s high-quality development stage and is better for identifying the impact of scale effect or technological effect in EKC. In this research, a super-efficiency slacks-based measure model is proposed to evaluate the green growth efficiency of 27 manufacturing industries, and a Luenberger index method is adopted to interpret the driving forces of efficiency. The results demonstrate that green growth efficiency in the manufacturing industry shows a fluctuating upward trend, and more than 60% of the industries are in a gray growth state. The growth of green growth efficiency mainly depends on the pulling effect of technological dividends brought by technological progress, rather than the improvement of technical efficiency. As the industry heterogeneity is analyzed, technology-intensive industries still dominate in the process of manufacturing industry and have shown a significant upward trend. Finally, some suggestions are proposed from the perspective of the government and enterprises.