In the constantly evolving and developing global economy today, energy is widely acknowledged as the major influential component in promoting economic growth. Therefore, the improvement of energy economic efficiency and the achievement of sustainable use of energy have become critically important for both China and the world. Hence, this paper adopts the novel dynamic network Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method to evaluate and study China's energy economic efficiency using panel data from 2015 to 2022. According to the findings of the study: (1) The total factor productivity of the energy economy in China's provinces broadly highlights an upward trend from 2015 to 2022; (2) The development of China's energy economic efficiency in 2015-2022 was positively influenced by the improvement of scale efficiency of S&T R&D progress in the first stage, but was hampered by the regression of scale efficiency of practical transformation of S&T achievements in the second stage and the decline of the technical progress index in each individual year; (3) The efficiency of China's energy scientific and technological R&D progress evidently demonstrates progressions. However, there is significant variation in the efficiency of this stage across different provinces and cities.
Keywords: China’s energy economy; Efficiency evaluation; Novel dynamic network DEA.
© 2025. The Author(s).