Sources of China’s Economic Growth: An Empirical Analysis Based on the BML Index with Green Growth Accounting

Abstract:The paper aims at continuing the discussion on sustainability and attempts to forecast the impossibility of the expanding consumption worldwide due to the planet's limited resources. As the population of China, India and other developing countries continue to increase, they would also require more natural and financial resources to sustain their growth. We coarsely estimate the volumes of these resources (energy, food, freshwater) and the gross domestic product (GDP) that would need to be achieved to bring the population of India and China to the current levels of consumption in the United States. We also provide estimations for potentially needed immediate growth of the world resource consumption to meet this equality requirement. Given the tight historical correlation between GDP and energy consumption, the needed increase of GDP per capita in the developing world to the levels of the U.S. would deplete explored fossil fuel reserves in less than two decades. These estimates predict that the world economy would need to find a development model where growth would be achieved without heavy dependence on fossil fuels.

Section: Energy-based Economic Growth and Natural Resources Constrainsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resource Demand Growth and Sustainability Due to Increased World Consumption

Balatsky

Borysov

2015

“…Therefore, most papers handle the multi-input/output models using DEA and SEM. DEA is especially important in the field of environmental economics since it handles desirable outputs as well as undesirable outputs such as CO2 [2,3,10]. SEM is also another popular approach for handling diverse survey related issues because it clarifies the role of intermediation resulting from the complexity among the variables [1,13].…”

Section: Methodologies Of Sustainability Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The empirical results show that, in general, physical capital accumulation is the most important driving force for economic takeoff, while CO2 emissions with environmental regulation restrain economic growth in some provinces. It is argued that high growth by simply increasing factor inputs will not only result in a waste of resources, but also in environmental pollution [3]. The more serious task for the Chinese government comes from the fact that carbon emission reduction targets will not be met by controlling economic development [4].…”

Section: Important Issues For a Sustainable Asiamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Chinese government's response to this issue should be to assess the feasibility of economic growth against the constraints of resources and the environment. One study presented in this issue takes constraints on resources and the environment into account and uses frontier technology boundary analysis and directional distance function (DDF) to propose a decomposition of the sources of economic growth within the green growth accounting framework and then measures the sources of China's economic growth between 1998 and 2012 based on the new biennial Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index [MLPI] [3]. Using MLPI and based on the data envelopment analysis (DEA) and DDF, Chinese economic growth is decomposed with seven components: (1) technical efficiency change; (2) technological change; (3) labor effect; (4) capital effect; (5) energy effect; (6) output structure effect; and (7) environmental regulation effect.…”

Section: Important Issues For a Sustainable Asiamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Introduction to the Special Issue on “the Sustainable Asia Conference 2014”

Choi

Zhang

2015

The continuous expansion and change in Asia is attracting increasing attention from the rest of the world. Thus, the papers from the Sustainable Asia Conference 2014 (SAC 2014) could provide a platform to examine outperforming governance factors and mechanisms in this dynamically growing region. This editorial for SAC 2014 will highlight the contents and methodologies of selected papers, presenting diverse issues in sustainable policies and strategies.

“…In contrast, "black development", which has been conducted by many countries during industrialization, indicates that economic growth occurs with high environmental costs and huge resource consumption [25]. To achieve sustainable development, governments should transform the pattern of economic growth from black to green to realize a win-win solution for economic development and environmental protection [26]. Therefore, it is extremely necessary to investigate the economic and environmental regulatory competition among governments in a common framework, as environmental regulatory competition always appears to be the method for economic competition.…”

Section: From Rtb (Rtt) To Rbd (Rgd)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Regional Competition, Heterogeneous Factors and Pollution Intensity in China: A Spatial Econometric Analysis

Huang

Xia

2016

Regional competition may play an important role in the balance of environmental protection and economic growth. However, it is a pending issue of whether the competition among Chinese local governments leads to a race to black development or green development. This paper aims to explore the strategic interactions in provincial development in terms of an environment-economic indicator, i.e., the pollution intensity in China from 2000 to 2013. We divide four predominant industrial pollutants into two groups according to whether the pollutant is regulated, and then test the strategic interactions among regions based on the spatial lag term by employing the spatial Durbin model. The results show that the heterogeneous factors, such as various pollutants and regional difference, may give rise to diversified competition strategies. We find that the "race to black development" hypothesis is not supported at the national level, and the "race to green development" hypothesis is established in the developed eastern regions only in terms of the regulated industrial pollutants. We also detect how pollution intensity is influenced by the direct and spatial spillover effects of environmental regulation and find that environmental legislation has been effective in reducing regulated pollutants' pollution intensity, while the effects of environmental staff and investment are weak. Finally, some policy suggestions are discussed.