LAUSR

Abstract Whether the increasing regional eco-efficiency improves local residents’ health conditions has aroused great interest from scholars, practitioners or decision makers by implanting sustainable development strategy. And there lack direct quantitative evidence to testify the above influence is positive or negative, and computing its magnitude. Considering their uncertain, fuzzy and multi-factor complex relationship, the paper selected 5 indicators-Visits to hospitals, Outpatients with Emergency Treatment, Number of Inpatients, Number of Health Examinations, Patients Discharged-as proxy variables for residents’ health conditions and adopted regional eco-efficiency with other 6 control variables as explanatory variables, then built a Sensitivity Measurement Method with Support Vector Machines (SMM-SVM) to make analysis, finally applied Chinese province-level data from 2002 to 2016 to the proposed method. Empirical results shown that the changes at the national level and the provincial level were slightly different, which could be explained by control variables that characterize regional endowments: (1) From the national level, improving the eco-efficiency by 1% caused the decreasing of the number of Visits to Hospitals (0.041%), Outpatients with Emergency Treatment (0.029%), Outpatients with Emergency Treatment (0.307%) and a total 0.053%, equal to Patients Discharged (0.371%) minus Number of Inpatients (0.318%); (2) From the provincial level, 73.33%, 73.33%, 70.00% and 60.00%, 60.33% of 30 regions promoted the residents’ health condition by improving eco-efficiency, which was similar to the national level; (3) GDP per capita, Urbanization level, Population density, Medical personnel, Licensed (assistant) doctors, and Number of health care institutions were helpful to understand heterogeneity of degree of change. Provincial real situation and differences help to evaluate the effect of regional eco-efficiency on residents’ health conditions, and quantitatively guide the sustainable development and enhance public health.