Exploring The Dynamic And Capacity Of Sustainable Development In China’s Resource-based Cities’ Industry

The development of resource-based cities are playing a significant role in China’s economic and social advancement. However, most of the cities are recently threatened by the problems of environmental pollution, resource depletion and even economic recession. The development of China’s resource-based cities faces a bottleneck. The "Resource Curse" became a global phenomenon in the development of most resource-based cities. Therefore, through exploring in depth the systems of development capability and development mechanism and the establishing the sustainability system for the resource-based cities, the context of this study has great practical and theoretical significance in the transformation of the resource-based cities.This thesis is focused on the research and analysis of China’s total 117 resource-based cities. According to the life -cycle theory and the types of resource-based cities, the author has divided these cities into 16 categories. Then, according to the theory of sustainable development, this study explores the sustainability system of the resource-based cities including the ability system and the dynamic mechanism, through evaluating their system ability and analysing the dynamic mechanism to establish a sustainable development system for the resource-based cities.From the three perspectives of basic infrastructure, output capacity of production factor and environmental carrying capacity of resource-based cities, this thesis explores the sustainability of the resource-based cities. First, based on the methods of expert evaluation, AHP, the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation, according to the maximum membership degree principle, this thesis attempts to evaluate each city’s ability of establishing infrastructure through creating a two-level evaluation index system and collecting relevant economics data. According to the C-D production function model, taking the employment number as labour input and the stock of fixed assets as capital input each category of resource-based cities was considered as a research unit and then, through adopting the panel data model of least squares, the author calculates the production factor’s output elasticity of each city. Furthermore, on the basis of labour output elasticity and capital output elasticity, according to the Solow residual model, the author calculates the contribution rate of each factor to economic growth of resource-based cities and non-resource-based cities in order to analyse the relationships between the sustainable industrial development and the production factors of resource-based cities. More importantly, based on the Kuznets curve theory, taking the pollutants as indicators of the environmental impacts and GDP as an index of economic growth and the environment impacts to evaluate the resource-based cities’ environmental carrying capacity which is one of the important factors for sustainable industrial development.The driving force behind the industrial development of the resource-based cities are mainly the achieved levels of revenue from resource industries and the emergy from the resource endowment. Based on the Evolutionary Game Theory, considering the remuneration rate of production factors as the game proceeds, this study examines the revenue achieved by the members of resource industries from implementing the constant strategy and the mutation strategy to estimate the stability of resource industry groups. Meanwhile, using the sunk costs of resource industry system as evolutionary game costs, this thesis also analyses the evolutionary dynamic of resource industry system because the stable industrial system of resource-based city need the driving force of sustainable development. Natural resource endowment brings a higher emergy to their products, however, as an ecological economy, a resource-based city needs to trade with other cities, during which the products with higeremergy used to exchange the daily goods or production materials with lower emergy. However, this process has caused the emergy loss of the resource-based city, nevertheless the resource of the city is limited and the lost emergy cannot be compensated. Consequently, if the resource is exhausted, the resource-based city would be declining.Through analysing the sustainability and the dynamic system of resource-based cities, this thesis has attempted to establish a sustainable industrial system for the resource-based cities. According to the economic characteristics of resource-based cities, through adjusting the polies of monetary, fiscal, tax, etc. Decision makers can improve the provision capacity for basic infrastructure of the resource-based cities, amend the allocation of production factor income as well as enhance the ecological efficiency to establish an emergy compensation mechanism for facilitating the transformation and the upgrading of industrial system of resource-based cities.