Efficiency Evaluation of a Forestry Green Economy under a Multi-Dimensional Output Benefit in China—Based on Evidential Reasoning and the Cross Efficiency Model

The efficiency evaluation of forestry green economy development is related to the direction of forestry development and plays an important role in balancing the economic and environmental issues within that forestry development. The existing research faces three challenges: first, the output indicator is singular; second, the perspective of a self-assessment is extremely limited; and third, the multi perspective fusion method is not in line with the mechanism of the cross efficiency evaluation model. To address these challenges and the characteristics of forestry development output, we constructed multi-level output indicators from four aspects: ecology, economy, society, and sustainability and used evidence reasoning to combine the output indicators. Based on the perspective of a cross evaluation among peers, four different cross efficiency values are defined from the evaluation relationship between the different decision-making units to obtain economic–aggressive, social–neutral, ecological–benevolent, sustainable–neutral, and comprehensive–neutral cross efficiencies. According to the relationship between self- and cross evaluation, an order conditional entropy cross efficiency aggregation model has been proposed and used to analyze the development efficiency of the forestry green economy in 31 Chinese provinces in 2019. Considering the uneven distribution of the forestry resources in China, the development in the 31 provinces and cities is divided into four types by discussing the relationship between the output indicators and efficiency, while the reasons for the unbalanced development and the poor comprehensive development are discussed according to five cross efficiencies