Sustainable Development Efficiency of High Resource Consumption Countries and The Impact of Energy Imports

Abstract

Through the constructed inputs, desired and non-desired outputs of highly resource-consuming countries for 2010-2023, sustainable development efficiency values were calculated and analyzed using the SBM-DEA model. Then considering that the SBM model can only measure static efficiency and cannot reflect the inter-period changes in sustainable development efficiency, the changes in sustainable development efficiency were dynamically analyzed by calculating the Malmquist index. Considering the factor that highly resource-consuming countries have a large demand for energy consumption while their own countries need to import a lot of energy resources with limited energy resources, the impact of energy imports on the sustainable development level of highly resource-consuming countries is explored with sustainable development efficiency as the explanatory variable and energy imports as the core explanatory variable. The results show that: (1) the value of sustainable development efficiency of countries as a whole shows an upward trend, maintained at about 0.6 on average, but there is some variability among countries; (2) from a dynamic point of view, the Malmquist index is generally stable, consistent with the analysis of the results of the SBM-DEA model and the sustainable development efficiency is mainly dependent on the technical efficiency; (3) energy imports can improve the efficiency of sustainable development, but it is necessary to (3) Energy imports can improve the efficiency of sustainable development, but it is necessary to balance the relationship with renewable energy to avoid the economic and environmental risks of over-reliance.