Abstract: It is of great significance to the transition of regional development that whether the resource curse is supported from a multidimensional perspective, i.e., economy, resource and environment, instead of only considering the economic growth. An improved DEA model is used to measure provincial eco-efficiency in China from 2001 to 2011, and the difference between resource-dependent regions and resource-utilizing ones is compared. The empirical results show that resource curse phenomenon is not significant from the economic dimension, yet is significant from the multidimensional perspective, for the eco-efficiency of resource-utilizing is about 1.6 times of that of resource-dependent regions. Over 60% of eco-efficiency in the resource-dependent regions comes from scale effects. And the efficiency of resource-utilizing sectors in those regions is severely lower than that of resource exploration sectors, which contributes less than 40% to those regions' eco-efficiency. The key reason for low eco-efficiency may not be resource exploration but resource wastes in an environment with abundant resource. So improving resource utilization is one of the keys to enhance eco-efficiency.

Key words: green development, resource curse, eco-efficiency, resource exploration and utilization, contribution decomposition, synthetic control of structure