Abstract
Environmental protection has attracted much attention. This study first describes the status of the ecological environment and then uses data envelopment analysis and the system the system generalized method of moments (GMM) model to study the relationship between the environmental status and ecological sustainable total factor productivity (ESTFP) in 21 prefecture-level cities of Guangdong Province. The main conclusions of this study are as follows. (1) The ecological index (EI), which reflects the ecological environment, shows a general trend of first decreasing and then rising. The average EI value decreased from 80.95 in 2008 to 68.71 in 2011 and then gradually increased to 74.76 in 2017. (2) The ecological sustainable total factor productivity (ESTFP = 0.960), including the two additional dimensions of the urban resource consumption index (URCI) and urban pollution discharge index (UPDI), is better than the traditional total factor productivity (TFP = 0.954). (3) The EI has a highly significant positive promoting effect on ESTFP at a significance level of 1%. The methods and results from this research provide an important scientific reference for the research on urban production efficiency and sustainable urban development in China.