Model-based temporal evolution and spatial equilibrium analysis of green development in China's Yangtze River Economic Belt from 2009 to 2018

Green development is one of the important guidance and core contents of high-quality development of regional economy and society, and its spatial–temporal pattern evolution analysis is helpful to the scientific formulation of relevant policies. However, the green development evaluation is faced with multi attribute decision making difficulties. In view of this, firstly, based on discussing the connotation of green development from ontology, epistemology, axiology and methodology, a new evaluation indicator system from the four dimensions of energy conservation, emission reduction, efficiency increase and harmony was explored. Then, coupling symmetric cross entropy multi attribute decision making and Gini coefficient method, a comprehensive evaluation framework of temporal evolution and spatial equilibrium of green development was constructed and applied in 11 provinces (cities) of China's Yangtze River Economic Belt (YEB) from 2009 to 2018. The results show that during the study period, the green development level of YEB has improved year by year, but there was still a large gap. Among the 120 research samples, only 41.7% had a ranking score of more than 6, and only Chongqing in 2017 had a ranking score of more than 8. The Gini coefficient of green development in 11 provinces (cities) is about 0.2, which is balanced on the whole, but there is a significant difference in the indicators, such as proportion of new energy power generation, sulfur dioxide emission per 104 RMB yuan GDP and proportion of investment in environmental protection; The effect of energy conservation and emission reduction is obvious, while efficiency increase and harmony need to be improved. The complementary role of 11 provinces (cities) in YEB's green development has become increasingly prominent, which made that YEB (as a whole) ranked second in comparison with 11 provinces (cities) in 2018.