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Revealing Energy Over-Consumption and Pollutant Over-Emission Behind GDP: A New Multi-criteria Sustainable Measure

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Abstract

This paper develops a new measurement for regional/national sustainable social economic development based on data envelopment analysis. This new measurement can reveal the impact of energy over-consumption and pollutant over-emission on economic development, giving regional/national sustainable development a more proper measure. This new measurement is applied into an empirical study for 10 year (2004–2013) sustainable development analysis of 30 regions in mainland China. The empirical results show that: (1) China has a quite unsustainable development in 2004–2013, and the level of unsustainability increased over time. The primary driver of these two phenomenon is pollutant over-emission and resource over-consumption respectively. (2) Area-wide sustainable development in China is quite unbalanced. Eastern China has a much better sustainable development as compared to other areas, and the variation of Eastern China’s sustainable level is very little in 2004–2013. (3) Resource over-consumption and pollutant over-emission in western China are serious, even the absolute values are quite low. This makes western China develop unsustainably in 2004–2013.

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Acknowledgements

This research has financial supports from the China Scholarship Council (No. 201506340126), Support Funds for Excellent Doctoral Dissertations of USTC (2016-2017), National Natural Science Funds of China (Nos. 71501139, 71571173, 71573186, 71620182), Natural Science Funds of Anhui Province (No. 1708085QG169), Natural Science Funds of Jiangsu Province (No. BK20150307), and Research project of philosophy and Social Sciences in Universities of Jiangsu (2015SJB525).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Xiang Ji

  2. Naveen Jindal School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA

    Xiang Ji

  3. Research Center for Smarter Supply Chain, Soochow Think Tank and Dongwu Business School, Soochow University, Suzhou, China

    Jiasen Sun

  4. College of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China

    Qunwei Wang

  5. Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China

    Qianqian Yuan

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  1. Xiang Ji
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Correspondence to Jiasen Sun.

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Ji, X., Sun, J., Wang, Q. et al. Revealing Energy Over-Consumption and Pollutant Over-Emission Behind GDP: A New Multi-criteria Sustainable Measure. Comput Econ 54, 1391–1421 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10614-017-9663-y

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