Abstract: From the viewpoint of environmental economics, this paper establishes the index of coordination degree to describe the two indexes of economic growth efficiency and carbon emission reduction efficiency with the non-radial directional distance function and the TOPSIS method. And then it conducts an empirical study based on the data from China’s 29 provinces from 1998 to 2010. The results suggest that on the whole China’s technical efficiency of economic growth has a downward tendency, while the efficiency of carbon emission reduction has a bigger gap with respect to the efficiency of economic growth. Such phenomenon exists widely in China that carbon emission reduction lags behind economic growth. However, some provinces have started to change from the situation that carbon emission lagging seriously behind economic growth into the coordinated development between economic growth and carbon emission reduction, which indicates that China is gradually stepping on the road of low carbon development.

Key words: non-radial directional distance function; TOPSIS; efficiency of carbon emission reduction; coordinated development