Impact of agglomeration effect on industrial green development from the perspective of technology gap

Under the goal of achieving zero carbon or carbon neutrality in the world, three industrial transformation and upgrading is a feasible scheme to achieve low carbon. However, the three industries in different countries are heterogeneous in technology and management. If the efficiency of three industries is evaluated in a unified technical environment, the evaluation results may be limited, so that the industries upgrading cannot be effectively realized. Therefore, this paper considers the technical and management heterogeneity of three industries, constructs new meta-frontier data envelopment analysis framework. Under this framework, the degree of industrial agglomeration is divided, and by considering competitive effect, benchmarking effect and spillover effect in industrial agglomeration, three new meta-frontier non-radial distance function models are proposed, and then the total-factor unified efficiency is obtained. By further extending the framework, the reasons for the inefficiency of three industries under competitive effect, benchmarking effect and spillover effect are analyzed. The results show that industrial development of all countries has great room for improvement, and the three agglomeration effects have different influences on countries with different agglomeration levels, in which the medium agglomeration is most conducive to green development of three industries. Surprisingly, the development of the secondary industry is most vulnerable to spillover effects. Moreover, countries with similar agglomeration levels have the strongest effect, and countries with the same agglomeration level have the same source of inefficiency in three industries.