A DEA-based empirical analysis for dynamic performance of China's regional coke production chain

Coke plays a critical role in China's national economic activities in the past several decades. However, because of the twofold pressures from the sustainability-concerned public and the international steel market downturn, China's coke industry steps into a dilemma. To provide the industry with quantitative guidelines of resolving its current problems, an empirical analysis for dynamic performance of China's regional coke production chain from 2006 to 2011 is demonstrated. Through adopting the slacks-based measure (SBM) in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and a famous dynamic network DEA framework, this paper simplifies the coke production chain into a three-stage process, and captures the interactions between intermediates inside each stage. The results show that: (i) In the stage of coke supply, central China performs at the highest efficiency level, followed by eastern China, with western China being the worst. (ii) In the stage of production (direct consumption of coke), the efficiency of eastern China is relatively high compared to the other regions. (iii) In the stage of consumption of industrial products, the efficiency of eastern China is better than that of central and western China. (iv) In terms of integrated efficiency, the province of Jiangsu is the highest.