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Abstract

Groundwater overdraft has affected sustainable development, especially in North and Coastal China, since the 1960s. The Chinese government instituted the Pilot Project of Groundwater Overexploitation Control (PPGOC) in Hebei Province during 2014 to 2016. This project introduced a set of hydrological, agricultural and administrative activities to recover the aquifer in the pilot area. In order to evaluate the effects of these activities on the groundwater status, a series of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models are assembled as a model group and applied to calculate the relative performance of groundwater recovery units, i.e. the recovery efficiency in 49 counties or Decision-Making Units (DMUs). It is shown that the DEA model group can be used to evaluate the recovery efficiency, improve the performance of units not on the DEA frontier via radial and slack movement, and study the possibility of cost reduction. The result shows that 20 DMUs formed the frontier, which is the collective of the efficient DMUs, and that another 29 DMUs require efficiency improvement. The high efficiency of certain DMUs is related to the location and farmers' responses, which indicates that groundwater overdraft recovery is a technical problem that also has something to do with social and economic development and comprehensive governance. The model group can be used as a reference in the forthcoming implementation of aquifer recovery in groundwater overdraft zones in North and Coastal China.