Abstract: Rural environmental protection is an important content of the rural revitalization strategy, and one of the important weak links as well. Based on the panel data of 29 provinces and cities across the country, this paper constructs a three-stage super-efficiency SBM-DEA model to evaluate the efficiency of China’s rural environmental pollution control and compare its regional differences. The findings show that the random error factors and the external environmental conditions will significantly affect the efficiency of rural environmental governance. Excluding the effects of the two, the efficiency of rural environmental pollution governance in China has been effectively improved from 2008 to 2017, from an ineffective state to an effective state, and it keeps a continuous up-rising tendency, but it still needs to be further improved. In addition, through regional comparison, the governance efficiency in the central and western regions is higher than that in the eastern region, and that in the northeast region is the lowest. Of which, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region has the highest governance efficiency, while Zhejiang Province has the lowest. In economically developed areas, governance efficiency may not be higher. The formation of regional differences stems from the combined effects of different geographical resource endowments, different economic development characteristics and different environmental protection policies in various regions of China.

Key words: rural environmental governance efficiency, three-stage super-efficiency SBM-DEA model, regional differences