تجزیه و تحلیل هزینه فایده برای رشد اقتصادی در چین

Currently, traditional development issues such as income inequality, depletion of natural resources, environmental pollution as well as retardation of infrastructure have occurred in China. In the future, more pressures would be imposed on China by the continuous fast development of industrialization, and with transfer of the world manufacture center to China. Sustainable development, including its economic, environmental and social elements, is a key goal of decisionmakers. This paper develops a methodology on cost benefit analysis of economic growth at macroscopic level to identify issues of China's sustainability. In order to address some important issues on how to make policies to improve the quality of economic growth, the CBA framework developed in this study analyses economic–ecological–social interaction, building three accounts that reflect three dimensions of sustainable development that includes 26 sub-models in all, and finally is integrated into an index as Net Progress Proceeds (NPP). The estimation methods of these submodels, such as cost of environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources and defensive expenditures are described in detail. Based on the framework and methods, this paper examines the costs and benefits of economic growth in three aspects of economy, ecology and society. The results illustrate that NPR of China's economic growth had been negative for a long time and has just became positive since year 2000 but was quite low. Even the best was only 1.6% in 2002 (the worst was − 24.2% in 1982). Based on the comparison between three accounts, we can draw a conclusion that ecological cost is the dominant factor that affects China's NPR. The empirical results show that if no other innovative measures or policies are taken in the future the costs of growth would outweigh its benefits, resulting in un-sustainability. Basically, the long-term economic growth would be unsustainable due to increasing environmental damage and depletion of natural resources. There are a few limitations that we consider need to be improved in our CBA framework and method, nevertheless they have many options that can be explored by policy makers, to make the development path more sustainable.

China has experienced a steady and high economic growth since 1980. Yet the growth is mostly in a traditional way and has led to a significant depletion of natural resources, a severe nationwide environmental pollution and ecological deterioration as well as a fundamental social change (Zhang and Wen, 2007). In 2003, China accounted for 4% of the world's total GDP. Its consumption of crude oil, ironstone, steel, alumina and cement, however, was 31%, 30%, 27%, 25% and 40% of the world totals respectively (Ma, 2004). China's emissions of pollutants remain also in a high level. Presently, for instance, China's solid waste per unit industrial output value is ten times higher than that of developed countries. China's NOx emission load per unit GDP is 27.7 times that of Japan and 2.8 times that of India, and China's SO2 emission load per unit GDP is 68.7 times that of Japan and 26.4 times that of Germany ( Fan, 2004). Over the last two decades, China has regarded economic development as a national priority to improve human welfare and eradicate poverty. Such economic growth indicators as GNP have been exclusively used to assess the success of national and regional development policies. Given the expectation that China's economy will be likely to continue to grow at the same pace in the next one or two decades as well as the fact that China is gradually becoming a world manufacturing center (Lu and Huang, 2003), China's natural resources, environment quality and social dimension are facing significant challenges. There is a great concern that if China is going to develop in the same way as it did in the last two decades, could China's economic prosperity be sustainable? What the implications would be to China's natural resources and environment? Might this development lead China to a disastrous ecological consequence and eventually social instability? To answer these strategic questions, there is a need to systematically investigate the relationships between economy, environment and society in China in the last two decades. In particular there is a need to examine the environmental and social costs China has sacrificed to its economic growth in the past. Based on these studies, our fundamental objective is to identify whether there is a pathway that will lead China to a more sustainable development track. This paper is devoted to answer part of the questions above by estimating the major environmental and social costs and benefits related to China's economic growth between 1980 and 2002. The methodology is based upon a conventional cost–benefit analysis (CBA) framework, yet with focus on the long term changes of trend. More specifically, this paper will first argue for the need for the consideration of the three dimensions of sustainable development in Section 2. An index named Net Progress Proceed (NPP) is developed as an indicator to evaluate the sustainability or net benefit-cost of economic growth at national level, which is very different with other similar indicators discussed below. The greater the positive NPP is, the more sustainable the economic growth. Therefore, an analysis model of CBA will then be presented in details to illustrate how it is conducted. Finally, different policies are discussed to evaluate their implications to sustainability in Section 4 before we conclude this paper in Section 5.

Aiming at the issues of economic growth China faces, we build a CBA framework under the principles of sustainable development, including three dimensions of ecology, economy and society. This methodology we developed in this study can make a systematic examination to evaluate the costs and benefits caused by economic growth at macroscopic level. It is necessary to select a long study period during which CBA framework and method are used to evaluate the effect of economic growth, or it would fail only with data of a year. Secondly, we need to compare the trends of the three accounts over times, especially the weight of every sub-account in GDP. At last, the economic growth affects sustainability in too many ways, so the framework is still not perfect and complete and can be further expanded to include more sub-accounts measured in monetary terms. How to measure those sub-accounts need more experiences and study. Of course, there are still some limitations in our CBA framework as follow: (1) The value of non-market products and services is very difficult to measure and needs a revised accounting system; (2) the assignment of sub-accounts in the three accounts is still arbitrary. Anyway, we consider this CBA method as a useful tool to identify the existent problems for economic growth of a country or region, and it provides an unconventional angle of view for the policy decision on sustainable development. The results derived from this study obviously show the large bubble of China's external growth of economy. The NPP is still very low because China's economic activities have brought serious costs in the aspects of economy, ecology and society, which is the strong evidence that economic growth can in many cases, be associated with declining welfare. Inequality, increased pollution, traffic congestion and a sense of disconnectedness from the community can all be by-products of the unbridled growth of economy. In conclusion, the larger and larger gap of income distribution is the main factor of economic cost, and social cost primarily comes from the lag of infrastructure building and the underemployment pressure in China. However, the dominant factor among all the costs is the ecological account. It always was in the state of serious deficit so as to almost counteract the total NPP of social account and economic account. That is, the costs resulted from issues of environment and natural resources offset half of the total benefits of economic growth. Therefore, the most important we need to focus on are natural resources, ecological environment and pollution control. Today, China has stepped into the mid-term phase of industrialization and met the turning point and regulative phase for many important matters (e.g., upgrade of industrial structure, urbanization, environmental protection and ecological conservation, development and management of natural resources, etc.). Based on the component analysis in each account, the primary factors that would affect China's sustainability in the future can be outlined as below: industrialization and industrial structure, urbanization, efficiency of resources consumption, investment and efficiency of public infrastructure, environmental protection and ecological conservation.