Study On The Efficiency Evaluation And Path Analysis Of Sustainable Economic Growth With The Restraints Of Resources And Environment In China

With the rapid development of our country,the accompanying environmental problem has become a key constraint of economic growth.The traditional concept of development holds that the economy is able to grow indefinitely under the assumption that economic growth is isolated from the external environment.However,the eco-system provides essential material resources for the economic development and absorbs the polltants emitted by the production and consumption activities.Hence,in addition to the traditional production factors(i.e.labor,capital and technology),a favorable eco-environment is also the main driver for the continued economic growth.China is in a fast process of industrialisation and urbanization,and thus it has recently become an urgent concern to promote economic development onto the road of resources reduction and environmental decompression.First of all,quantitatively measuring and evaluating the ecological environment is the basis of sustainable development research.Ecological footprint analysis is one of the most popular and widely used methods.It quantifies the sustainability of ecological environment in a region from the perspective of biological production by comparing the profit and loss between the ecological occupancy of human material needs and the ecological carrying capacity of the ecosystem.Secondly,how to establish a link between economic and environmental goals is a key issue in the study of sustainable development.Decoupling analysis and ecological efficiency are effective indicators for linking both.Decoupling indicators can determine the degree of coupling between economic growth and environmental pollution in order to take appropriate measures to mitigate or even block the relevance of the two.Ecological efficiency emphasizes the harmonization of environmental and economic benefits,that is,with lower resource inputs and pollution emissions to achieve higher economic output,it will bring the economic development of environmental externalities to internalize to reflect the sustainable development level.Finally,how to achieve economic growth under environmental constraints is a realistic problem to sustainable development.The endogenous growth model can probe into the conditions of sustainable growth from the perspective of long-term economic development.In the economic growth model,the introduction of environmental factors such as quality,technological progress,environmental investment,can reflect the environmental constraints of the sustainable economic growth trajectory to acertain extent.Based on the analysis of the domestic and international studies,this research focused on the sustainable economic growth along with the framework “the assessment of ecological environmental sustainability(the basic issue)-the coordination of economic benefits and environmental benefits(the key issue)-the green and sustainable economic growth path(the real issue)”.The main contents are displayed as follows:First,the improved ecological footprint model is used for the evaluation and prediction of environmental sustainability and ecological security.It reflects that how economic growth affects natural environmental,as well as the developing trends in the future.The ecological footprint proposes a land based indicator on assessing resource sustainability,namely,the amount of bioproductive land needed to ensure a given population or system This study calculated the ecological footprint and ecological carrying capacity of China from 1978 to 2013 using a modified ecological footprint method.Then the ecological security was analyzed using four eco-indicators(i.e.ecological deficit index,ecological pressure,ecological footprint diversity,as well as ecological and economic coordination coefficient).At last,the linear autoregressive integrated moving average(ARIMA)and nonlinear artificial neural network(ANN)models were applied to predict the ecological security.The results show that:(1)The per capita EF increased 3 times from 1978 to 2013,whereas the per capital ecological carrying capacity experienced only a slight increase,which lead to the further enlarged ecological deficit.(2)The energy footprint increased 14 times during the study period and accounted for 54.79% of the total ecological footprint in2013.The ecological footprints for built-up area and pasture were the minimum components of the total ecological footprint.(3)The ‘degree of ecological security'increased from level 2(relatively safe)to level 5(very unsafe).The ecological footprint diversity index and ecological and economic coordination coefficient presented an inverted“U” shape curve.(4)The predictions indicate that the degree of ecological security in China will reach to level 6(completely unsafe)in 2019.Second,according to the by-production technologies,we constructed the frontier model of multiple productive relations to assess the regional eco-efficiency of our country from the perspectives of production technologies and mitigation technologies.Eco-efficiency,joining the economic and environmental benefits together,reflects the ability to produce more goods and services while consuming fewer natural resources and inflicting less impact on the environment.In this paper,we utilized a newly developed dataenvelopment analysis(DEA)model based on by-production(BP)technologies,modeled as an intersection of intended production technologies and nature's residual-generation technologies,to evaluate the regional eco-efficiency in China.This model was constructed by directional-distance-function(DDF)and F?re-Grosskopf-Lovell(FGL)and had a greater ability to capture the trade-offs between inputs and outputs through multiple production relations.In addition,considering the nonparametric frontier estimators are based on a finite sample of observations and may be sensitive to sampling variations,we modified the smoothed bootstrap procedure to investigate the sampling properties of non-parametric DEA estimators defined.The empirical results demonstrate that:(1)Most Chinese regions improved both production and environmental efficiency during the study period,while a greater improvement in environmental efficiency than in production efficiency;(2)The gaps in production efficiency were larger than that in environmental efficiencies among Chinese eight economic areas.(3)The developed eastern regions have superior production efficiency,while the environmental efficiency is much inferior to the inland regions.The undeveloped northwest area is exactly opposite with the eastern regions;(4)The greatest improvement in both production efficiency and environmental efficiency appeared in north coast area.The northwest area and southwest area should pay more attention to production efficiency,and the Middle Yangtze River area should pay more attention to environmental efficiency.It should be noted that there is lifting space for both production efficiency and environmental efficiency in Middle Yellow River area.Third,based on the decoupling theory and shadow price theory,this paper investigated the coupling relationship between China's economic growth and pollutant emission,as well as the pollutant's marginal mitigation cost,through constructing the decoupling index decomposition model and parametric directional distance function.The decoupling theory explores how to reduce or block the correlation between economic development and environmental pollution.China is the world's largest energy consumer and carbon emitter,and therefore the energy-related carbon emissions can be an excellent proxy of environment pollution.This paper constructed an expanded decomposition model combining on the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index(LMDI)and Tapio index to analyze the factors affecting the decoupling elasticity and decoupling effort of regional industry growth and environmental pressures.In addition,in order to provide reference to realize decoupling,the regional potential for energy saving and emission reduction as well as pollutant's abatement cost are estimated.The results show that:(1)The carbon emissions of Hebei andShandong were significantly higher than the other provinces and the national average between 1996 and 2012.Carbon emissions in most of the regions were dominated by manufacturing industry,while in some certain regions were dominated by transportation industry.(2)Economic output effect took the main responsibility for the rapid growth of industrial CO2 emissions.Energy intensity effect made significant contributions to the industrial decoupling progress.The industrial structure effect and energy structure effect had not yet been fully effective.(3)The decoupling index for the whole country demonstrated an inverted “U” shape which moved from weak decoupling to weak coupling and then fell back to weak decoupling.(4)All of the regions made efforts to decouple the economic growth from pollution emissions.Among them,Beijing made the biggest progress while Hainan and Fujian were the least.(5)The Middle Yellow River and northwest areas had the greatest potential to save energy and reduce emissions,and the average pollutants' marginal abatement costs are 5632 yuan/ton and 4809 yuan/ton,respectively.The south coast area and east coast area had the smallest potentials for energy conservation and emissions reduction,and the average pollutants' marginal abatement costs are 6281 yuan/ton and 6001 yuan/ton,respectively.Fourth,based on the green growth theory,this paper constructed an endogenous economic growth model with the restriction of ecological environment and obtained the growth rates of technological progress,environmental quality and economy under the steady state condition.And then we analyzed the conditions of economic sustainable growth according to the results of the model.The green growth theory stresses the environmental sustainability-based economic progress.It holds the environmental protection is able to promote economic growth,rather than hindering the economic progress.This paper constructed an economic growth model incorporating the environment quality,and meanwhile,the environmental self-purification capability,environmental protection investment and human capital distribution were considered.We obtained the balanced growth solution under steady state conditions through Hamilton function in order to explore the conditions of sustainable economic growth.The results showed that:(1)the coordinated development between sustained economic growth and environmental quality improvement can be achieved under the condition of the steady state,and technological progress is the main source of economic growth and environmental quality improvement.(2)Increasing the proportion of human capital in the R&D department is able to enhance the growth rate of technological progress.Reducing the output elasticity of material capitalin the production department can improve the growth rate of environmental quality,which shows that economic model depended on material capital investment would restrict the improvement of environmental quality.Reducing the output elasticity of human capital in the production department can speed up the economic growth,which shows that the role of labor capital becomes smaller when the economic development reachs to a certain stage.All in all,the fundamental reason of environmental problem is that the economic pressure caused by economic activities exceeds the environmental self-repair capacity.Therefore,to realize the sustainable economic growth,we need to coordinate the relationship between environment and economy.Accordint to the ecological management theories(i.e.ecological footprint,eco-efficiency,decoupling index,shadow price and green growth),some important issues related to the sustainable economic growth are explored,so as to be targeted to develop policies and measures to promote economic development to shifte from “quantity” to “quality”.