A grey dynamic model for the evaluation of regional sustainable development and its emoirical study

Currently,traditional development issues,such as economic stagnation,as well as new challenges like environmental degradation and globalization,need attention.Sustainable development,including economic,environmental,and social elements,is a main goal of decision-makers.The key to sustainable decision-making is to evaluate and forecast the status quo of sustainable development.Policy makers need a tool based on scientific information to forecast the effects of future actions on sustainability and make policies for sustainable development.This paper analyzes the relation of the economy,environment and social welfare by the grey dynamic model.The proposed method use time series and basic indicators of ecological system,including economic,environmental and social sub-systems.It is applied to Heilongfiang Province and Jiangsu Province.The results have proved different status quo of sustainable development in these two regions,and suggestions are proposed,such as optimization of industrial structure and eco-industrial development.The conclusion is that there is no unique sustainable path,and accordingly,policy makers shouM choose different criteria and strategies to make efficient sustainable decisions for each region.     

A grey dynamic model for the evaluation of regional sustainable development and its empirical study

Currently, traditional development issues, such as economic stagnation, as well as new challenges like environmental degradation and globalization, need attention. Sustainable development, including economic, environmental, and social elements, is a main goal of decision-makers. The key to sustainable decision-making is to evaluate and forecast the status quo of sustainable development. Policy makers need a tool based on scientific information to forecast the effects of future actions on sustainability and make policies for sustainable development. This paper analyzes the relation of the economy, environment and social welfare by the grey dynamic model. The proposed method uses time series and basic indicators of ecological system, including economic, environmental and social sub-systems. It is applied to Heilongjiang Province and Jiangsu Province. The results have proved different status quo of sustainable development in these two regions, and suggestions are proposed, such as optimization of industrial structure and eco-industrial development. The conclusion is that there is no unique sustainable path, and accordingly, policy makers should choose different criteria and strategies to make efficient sustainable decisions for each region.     

Another strategy to assess sustainable development

The goal of sustainoble development is to preserve sustainabitity trod simultaneously prevent catastrophe in a man-land .system. However, almost all the existing approaches to assessing sustainable development are to measure the sustainability. namely appraise from the obverse side of the sustainable development. So it seems necessary to attack the same task on the reverse, namely to measure the passibility of eatostrophe. In this paper, with a case study of Tianjin, China. we employ catastrophe theory and models to integrate Tianjin＇s sustainable development indicators, and then deduce the catastrophe risk index （ CRI） to present the level of catastrophic possibility in the city. Applying catastrophe theory, is a new strategy to assess sustainable development and shows great practical significance, especially for those developing regions or countries, who always give more priority to their economy and therefore have more obligation to make sure whether their social economic activities might bring forth any ecological environment catastrophe. Besides, being both qualitative and quantitative, the approach could be employed to explore not only static characteristics bat also dynamic mechanism of man-land system. Although our work is only a maiden attempt and still calls for further effort to improve it, the case study of Tianjin in this paper would assure as the great promising future to apply, catastrophe theory to sustoinable devetopment modeling,     

浅谈区域可持续发展的静态评估指标体系构建

可持续发展已经被确定为我国21世纪的国家发展战略,但是,如何将这一崭新的科学发展观转换成可操作的管理模式,进而指导和规范我们的实际行动,仍然需要进行多方面的研究和探讨,其中,在某区域内评价和检测可持续发展的状态和可持续发展的程度是一个关键的问题.故在分析影响区域可持续发展水平诸因素的基础上,构建了区域可持续发展的静态评估指标体系,并对区域可持续发展总水平的综合评估方法作了具体阐述.     

Measuring sustainable development — Nation by nation

Sustainable development represents a commitment to advancing human well-being, with the added constraint that this development needs to take place within the ecological limits of the biosphere. Progress in both these dimensions of sustainable development can be assessed: we use the UN Human Development Index (HDI) as an indicator of development and the Ecological Footprint as an indicator of human demand on the biosphere. We argue that an HDI of no less than 0.8 and a per capita Ecological Footprint less than the globally available biocapacity per person represent minimum requirements for sustainable development that is globally replicable. Despite growing global adoption of sustainable development as an explicit policy goal, we find that in the year 2003 only one of the 93 countries surveyed met both of these minimum requirements. We also find an overall trend in high-income countries over the past twenty five years that improvements to HDI come with disproportionately larger increases in Ecological Footprint, showing a movement away from sustainability. Some lower-income countries, however, have achieved higher levels of development without a corresponding increase in per capita demand on ecosystem resources.     

Quantitative evaluation of sustainable development based on ecological footprint method: a case study of Tianjin

Since the concept of sustainable development emerged in the late 1980s, more and more countries and regions have been utilizing sustainable development as their developing strategy. But decades have passed without any effective methods available to quantitatively assess sustainable development, Since the ecological footprint evaluation method initiated in 1992, it has become popular in quantitative assessment of sustainable development because of its convenience, easy-understanding, and reliability. As one of the biggest coastal cities in north China and the economic center of the Bohai Coastal Region, Tianjin's gross domestic product (GDP) was 369.762 billion yuan in 2005, accounting for 2.0% of the whole nation's GDP The paper analyzes Tianjin's development with the ecological footprint method, and the results show that Tianjin's ecological footprint and biocapacity in 2005 were 2. 507gha/cap and 0.276gha/cap respectively. The ecological deficit was 2.230gha/cap. And from 1980 to 2005, Tianjin's ecological deficit per 104 yuan GDP decreased; while per capita ecological deficit has been tending to increase rapidly in recent years. All these results demonstrate that Tianjin is in a state of unsustainable development.     

A fuzzy goal programming approach to analyse sustainable development goals of India

Energy policy, environmental planning and economic development play a key role in sustainable development. Sustainable development requires suitable and strategic policies satisfying multiple and conflicting objectives. Fuzzy goal programming (FGP) is a well-known approach in multi-criteria decision-making for its practical application. In this article, a FGP approach is proposed to analyse environmental, energy and sustainability goals of India by the year 2030 with reference to the key economic sectors of India. The presented model analyses the improvement opportunities, requirement of efforts and implementation of the sustainable development plans. Numerical illustration is also provided for validation and application of the proposed model.     

On multistage flexible comprehensive evaluation of complicated system

The paper analyzed characters of complicated system and discussed the reason of comprehensive evaluation, realization of flexible comprehensive evaluation was researched from prospect of dynamic measure selection of evaluation, balance of functionality and harmony, uncertainty factor. In the end, multistage flexible comprehensive evaluation of complicated system was applied to performance evaluation of firm.     

An environmental-economic measure of sustainable development

A central issue in the study of sustainable development is the interplay of growth and sacrifice in a dynamic economy. This paper investigates the relationship among current consumption, sacrifice and sustainability improvement in a general context and in two canonical, stylized economies. We argue that the maximin value of utility measures what is sustainable and provides the limit to growth. Maximin value is interpreted as a dynamic environmental-economic carrying capacity and current utility as an environmental-economic footprint. The time derivative of maximin value is interpreted as net investment in sustainability improvement. It is called durable savings to distinguish it from genuine savings, usually computed with discounted-utilitarian prices.     

Foresight: A major tool in tackling sustainable development

For many decades, the concept of sustainability has been highly successful in public policies and even in the business world.¹ Nowadays, all initiatives must be sustainable and are primarily assessed on that criterion. However, the efforts made to construct specific methods dedicated to building sustainable strategies seem rather weak. Futurists themselves underestimate the relationship between sustainable development and foresight, even if they are talking about sustainable planning.² They remain generally unaware that foresight could be a major tool in tackling sustainability as well as one of the best methods of preparing sustainable strategies and policies.Indeed, one of the biggest problems in sustainability approaches is the simplistic way used to define the concept, for instance, by using only the very first part of the 1987 the Bruntland report Our Common Future and by limiting the fields of activity on sustainability to the three pillars of the OECD model: economy, social questions, environment.At the Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference (December 2009), it seemed forgotten that sustainability is already an old issue in which futurists were heavily involved at the time of the United Nations Stockholm Environment Conference (1972), in the Limits to Growth Report, published by the Club of Rome (1972)³ and in the OECD Interfutures Foresight, spurred on by Jacques Lesourne (1978).⁴Since that time (forty years ago!) researchers and consultants have learned how to deal with the concept of sustainability, how to analyze it as an ultimate aim for society as a whole as well as a complex object that needs to be approached with adequate methods such as systemic analysis.As Christian Stoffaës said, the aim of foresight is sustainable development in a changing world. As a result, the ultimate aim of strategic foresight appears to be clear: it is sustainability. This article highlights that fundamental relationship as we see it today.⁵     

Financial crisis and sustainable development of Chinese manufacturing industry

Sub-prime lending crisis has become an international financial crisis, which is evolving into an economic recession sweeping across the West. Financial crisis leads to the demand reduction in western countries, and as the largest manufacturing country, China must face overproduction. The role of China as ＂world factory＂ determines that financial crisis will severely attack Chinese manufacturing industry. The unsustainable development of Chinese manufacturing industry is mainly reflected in the following aspects： heavy dependence on export, low-level manufacturing link, lack of modern service industry and high-tech industry, weak independent innovative ability, unsustainable exploration of heavy-pollution resources, and lack of international famous brands. How to transform crisis to opportunities is an urgent research topic. Under the circumstance of financial crisis. Chinese manufacturing industry has more external drives to change the current situation. Therefore, financial crisis becomes not only an opportunity for Chinese manufacturing industry to improve itself based on the existing accumulation but also a chance for China to transform from ＂world factory＂ into a powerful nation of manufacturing industry in the world.     

基于DEA模型的湖北省可持续发展效率评价

首先阐述了C2R、BC2和FG模型的构造和原理,然后从系统的投入产出角度出发,建立了湖北省2001—2008年可持续发展的DEA评价模型,并对各年份的技术效率、纯技术效率、规模效率以及规模收益状况作综合分析,其结果具有较强的可操作性,能够为决策者制定科学的可持续发展政策提供有效的参考。     

Frontiers and sustainable economic development

Exploiting new resource “frontiers,” such as agricultural land and mineral reserves, is a fundamental feature of economic development in poor economies. Yet frontier-based development is symptomatic of a pattern of economy-wide resource exploitation in developing economies that: (a) generates little additional economic rents, and (b) what rents are generated are not being reinvested in other sectors. Such development is inherently unsustainable. The following paper explains this phenomenon, and provides evidence that long-run expansion of agricultural land and oil and natural gas proved reserves across poor economies is associated with lower levels of real income per capita. The paper proposes a frontier expansion hypothesis to explain why the structural economic dependence of these economies on frontier land expansion and resource exploitation is not conducive to sustained long-run growth. The key to sustainable economic development in poor economies will be improving the economic integration between frontier and other sectors of the economy, targeting policies to improved resource management in frontier areas and overcoming problems of corruption and rent-seeking in resource sectors.      

Economic diversity, development capacity and sustainable development of China

China's economic growth over the past several decades has been among the highest in the world. It has been fueled by cheap fossil fuel energy so energy consumption has risen rapidly, but there are signs that negative feedbacks in the form of waste and inefficiency may affect future development. If energy throughput exceeds the capacity of the environment to process the inevitable waste from production then the development may not be sustainable. We calculate economic diversity using an energy flow network analysis method to explore the relationships of development policy, energy use, efficiency and sustainable development. China and its provinces are presented as a case study and the development status of each province in China is presented. China's development policy does not appear to be sustainable over the period 1985–1998 because of unsustainable energy consumption trends and declining economic diversity. An energy consumption tax is proposed for increasing diversity and dealing with increasing energy consumption in China.     

城市化目标宜因地制宜、综合评价

城市化是经济和社会发展的必然趋势。城市化进程与经济、资源、环境、科技等因素密切相关,在制定本地城市化发展目标时应因地制宜,在评价城市化水平时应综合评价。     

The employment effects of sustainable development policies

This paper argues that it is time for ecological economists to bring the employment impacts of sustainable development policies to the forefront of the research agenda. Important conservation efforts continue to founder because of their perceived employment effects. The paper examines the evidence on the employment impacts of sustainable development policies and argues that maintaining or even increasing employment depends critically on appropriate policy design and attention to the political economy of implementation of policies. The paper concludes that a better understanding of these issues, fair labour market and structural adjustment programs, and especially forward planning to anticipate problem areas, must replace the piecemeal, ‘knee-jerk’ reactions to environmental issues, such as were evident in Australia during the last federal election.     

SEEA-2003: Accounting for sustainable development?

The revised SEEA-2003 elaborates physical and hybrid environmental-economic accounts, details valuation techniques for natural resources, but rejects monetary valuation of environmental degradation as “modeling”. Preference for physical accounting and corresponding loss of systemic coherence (as compared to the SEEA-1993) prevents meeting the proclaimed objective of assessing sustainable development.     

Resource constraint,sustainable economic growth pattern and transformation of economic system in China

Over the past 20 years, China has made spectacular achievements in economic growth as well as in thetransformation of economic growth pattern. Industrial structure is being updated, and technology is playing a more andmore important role in economic development. The energy and resource consumption in many industries and enterprisesare reducing. However, we should realize that there are still many problems in changing the economic growth pattern,such as high input, high consumption, high discharge, inharmony, recycling difficulty, and low efficiency, which havegreatly impaired and restrict Chinese economic development. Therefore, the fundamental change of the economic growthpattern is inevitable. Based on the analysis on the status quo and the exploit of resources, this paper suggests that thetransformation from unsustainable to sustainable growth is the only choice in changing the economic growth pattern. Inaddition, the transformation should not completely rely on the fundamental effects of market mechanism. We should makefull use of the power of governments to speed up the transformation of economic system.     

积极实施"走出去"战略促进对外贸易可持续发展

从我国对外贸易发展面临的问题出发，分析我国“走出去”战略对促进对外贸易的重要作用，提出有效实施“走出去”战略的主要设想。     

对我国服装品牌可持续发展的思考

当今社会是品牌消费的时代，随着生活水平的不断提高，人们对品质的要求也达到了以往从未有过的高度。本文通过对中国服装品牌存在问题的分析，探求适应我国服装品牌可持续发展的有效途径。