Obstacle diagnosis of green competition promotion: a case study of provinces in China based on catastrophe progression and fuzzy rough set methods.

As "green" and "sustainable" become the new themes of regional economic development, green competitiveness will undoubtedly become a new engine for regions to solve environmental, resource use, and other global problems to fit the new development themes. Unfortunately, the performance of regional green competitiveness is not always satisfactory due to various shortcomings. In this study, we abandoned the conventional research approach that directly explores the factors that promote regional green competitiveness and analyzed, instead, the obstacles to green competitiveness among provinces in China. The barrier degree was calculated for each obstacle using a catastrophe progression method and fuzzy rough set. Results showed that (a) resource and environmental problems have become increasingly prominent and have been the most common obstacles to promoting green competitiveness of provinces in China and (b) the obstacles to improving regional green competitiveness showed spatial differences and peculiarity according to the barrier degree. The outcome of the study can help policy makers to better understand and prioritize implementation strategies to develop effective action and policy interventions toward more successful construction of regional green competitiveness.