تنوع اقتصادی، ظرفیت توسعه و توسعه پایدار چین

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.

Sustainable development has been used widely as an organizing principle and has become a policy goal throughout the world. As a developing country, economic reform in China has led to remarkable economic growth with its gross domestic product growing at the average annual rate of approximately 10% over the period 1978–1998, amid many changes in its economic systems. Along with the rapid economic development, many problems have arisen. Since the adoption of a coastal development strategy in 1981, coastal provinces have been positively encouraged to grow faster and become wealthier than inland provinces. This has led to higher income disparities. Simultaneously many environmental problems related to pollution and resource loss have occurred as privatization and market economy reforms were carried out. At the crossroads, we need to assess the situation; is China's development sustainable during this fast development period? And if we are not on the road to sustainable development, what can we do? To answer these questions we analyze energy use in China and examine diversity, energy intensity and economic output. A measure of diversity is useful because it give us a means of tracking economic evolution and progress. Ulanowicz's development capacity formula offers a methodologically simple but comprehensive way to investigate the relationship of structure and performance. In this paper, we are following Templet (1999) to investigate economic systems in China. Templet (1999) adopted an energy flow network method and Ulanowicz's (1986) development capacity formula to discuss the relationship between economic diversity, output and development policy, and presented two distinct development strategies. The relationship between diversity, development and stability has been a topic of debate for nearly a century and an half. Ecology has been a particularly fertile domain for the discussion. Darwin (1859) first realized that productivity was related to diversity in ecological systems. Ulanowicz (1986) developed a general theory of growth and development from the view of ecosystems phenomenology and showed that diversity and capacity are related. Tilman et al. (1996) used grassland ecosystems to show the positive relationship between productivity, diversity and resource utilization efficiency. Development in ecosystems and economic systems is an evolutionary process that results in self-organization and structure change over time as energy is consumed and information increases. Economic systems and ecosystems increase complexity and reduce uncertainty over time, assuming conditions are favorable. This behavior resembles the dissipative structures of Prigogine (1980). Economic diversity refers to the number and equitability of energy flow paths within an economic system. It can be measured by how many different types of economic activities exist within the system and how equitably energy is distributed between them. The Shannon and Weaver (1949) (SW) equation captures both of these properties and is widely used in ecology to calculate ecological diversity. Economists have broadly discussed the relationship between diversity, stability and development policy since the 1950s, especially the relationship between diversity and stability. Various theory and methods have been proposed. Measures used to capture the level of economic diversity have ranged from simplistic percentage standards to the complex using portfolio variance analysis. The majority of economic diversity measures tend to fall into one of two groups: energy flow and portfolio variance measures. Templet (1996) estimated diversity in economic systems using broad economic sectors as energy nodes in the SW equation (Eq. (1)) and suggested a significant positive, logarithmic relationship of diversity to GNP/capita across countries. Further empirical results across the 50 US states suggest that higher levels of diversification are associated with higher levels of output (Templet, 1999). Portfolio theory has been adapted by Conroy (1974) and Brown and Pheasant (1985). This approach focuses on the individual industry's net returns, the stability of these net returns, and the covariance of these net returns among industries within the portfolio. Various combinations of portfolio elements provided a measure of diversity. Because the use of the covariance approach is not independent of stability itself, Portfolio theory has been criticized. Wagner and Deller (1998) took the endogenous interindustrial linkages into account and adopted an input–output approach to measure economic diversity. The relationship between economic structure (measured in terms of diversity) and performance (measured as growth or stability of employment or income) has received considerable attention in the empirical literature. Siegel et al. (1995) have suggested using an input–output model that incorporates elements of portfolio theory for the analysis of economic diversity. Because of lack of data availability, attention has not been devoted to investigating the relationship between economic diversity and development policy. Ulanowicz's development capacity formula offers a comprehensive means of analyzing the relationship between an ecological system's structure and other ecological phenomenon (Ulanowicz, 1986 and Ulanowicz, 1997). The layout of the remainder of the paper is as follows. The next section presents a short exposition of Ulanowicz's development capacity formula. Section 3 uses data from China and its 29 provinces to estimate diversity indexes and to discuss the relationship of diversity and development capacity. Policy implications are also explored. We finish with a brief conclusion.

Economic and ecological systems share some common features. Both are self-organizing in response to information feedback and energy flows. This empirical analysis of China shows that Ulanowicz's development capacity formula is useful in combination with diversity in predicting economic outputs and illustrates the factors which influence output. Two development paths emerge, increasing diversity or increasing energy consumption. Both can change simultaneously and most countries use a combination of increasing energy consumption and increasing diversity. Because increasing energy consumption is easier to accomplish, developing countries tend to use this path but, consequently, environmental problems begin to arise during development. Sustainable development should rely on increasing an economic system's diversity and stabilizing energy use. Development capacity, diversity, and energy consumption provide guides to determine whether a country or district's development is sustainable or not. Increasing energy consumption without increasing diversity is not sustainable, increasing diversity with decreasing or stable energy consumption is sustainable if throughputs of energy and materials through the economy are within the carrying capacity of the environment. According to our analysis of China over the period of 1981–1998, China's development is not sustainable because its diversity is gradually declining and higher economic growth rates were fueled by higher energy consumption. Increasing atmospheric pollution indicates that the environment's sink capacity has been exceeded. The cross-sectional analysis data on China provinces showed that most of the provinces in China adopted unsustainable development policies as evidenced by increasing energy consumption. The negative effects from energy use, such as extraction, landscape change, water and air pollution, health effects and resource consumption, would ultimately slow down the economic development of China. The more sustainable approach is to increase diversity so that energy use can stabilize or decline and development capacity can increase or stay the same. An energy consumption tax or carbon tax is a feasible way to discourage energy consumption and encourage diversity and efficiency. 4.1. Data resources The data and discussion on China and its provinces’ energy consumption were drawn from official publications on energy development and the national condition analysis report. The statistics were drawn largely from various collection of China energy consumption Yearbook, 1985–1996 and from China statistical Yearbook, 1997–1999. Although these statistical data are improving in quality, they sometimes lack consistency in reporting from year to year. While this may not be ideal, the data are the best available.