Productivitv Growth, Resource Saving And Pollution Control

For decades of high speed development with ignorance of environmental costs, China is confronted with a serious resource and environmental crisis.And pressures on economic growth for China from the constraints of resources and environment are higher and higher. As the external demand circumstance and endowment condition has changed since 2008, China has to accelerate the pace of transiting its old and unsustainable growth mode. Therefore, we should conduct a comprehensive survey on the quality differences of China’s economic growth since the new millennium, and on the achievements and problems in the process of economic growth transition, which is really meaningful to understand Chinese economic growth pattern and optimize economic policies.From three closely related dimensions, productivity growth-resource conservation-pollution reduction, this paper researches the quality changes of China’s economic growth from both general and partial aspects adopting provincial panel data from the year 2001 to 2012. On general aspect, this paper firstly builds a non-radial global envelope productivity index, SSBM-Global Malmquist, decomposes the labor productivity growth into contributions from efficiency improvement, technology progress and capital deepening and comparatively analysis the changes about the contributions to the labor productivity growth before and after the financial crisis in 2008. And then, under the framework of resource and environmental constraints, this paper builds a productivity indicator, SSBM-Global Luenberger, to calculate the changes about the contributions to the green TFP and inefficiency of different regions in China and comparatively analysis the differences among regions. Furthermore, on partial aspect, this paper researches the related theme about water resources and water environment. This paper builds an input price system based on regional factor endowment, calculates the efficiency changes of water resource using cost-efficiency DEA model and evaluates the optimization degree of factor input structure in different regions. And then, under the framework of total factor analysis, this paper decomposes the water pollution emission intensity, calculates the changes of industrial productivity in different regions and measures the industrial-scale’s influence on water pollution emission intensity in central and western of China.The main conclusions from researches are as follows:(1) the total factor productivity of China was declining since 2005, and the financial crisis further deteriorated the decline, which made the labor productivity growth more dependent on capital deepening and made China enter a vicious circle that the less efficient the more dependent on investment growth and the faster investment growth the lower efficiency; (2) the green TFP of China has been improved in total, but that of the northeast regions, southern coastal regions and the middle reaches of the Yangtze river has presented a deteriorating trend and the gap between the green TFP and productivity technology frontier of most provinces has been bigger and bigger; (3)the industrial sector’s input structure of most provinces was not consistent with their own endowment characteristics which means that their input of water exceeded the optimal level in general; (4)the productivity growth has played an important role on the decrease of the industrial water pollution emission intensity in regions in the middle and the west of China, but the expansion of industrial scale has played an adverse role on the industrial water pollution emission intensity in some regions in the west of China.Moreover, based on these conclusions, this paper puts forward some policy implications about how to realize economic transition, resource conservation and pollution reduction in China, which are as follows:We should (1) make full use of the market mechanism to allocate resources and enhance investment efficiency; (2) further strengthen the enforcement of environmental regulation to drive the economic transition; (3) improve the formation mechanism of resource prices oriented by the market and the regional differences in endowment to guide the optimization of industrial spatial distribution and enhance the resource usage efficiency; and (4)accelerate the promotion to establish the joint control system of pollution and the ecological protection compensation mechanism to enhance the willingness and ability to pay for the environmental protection in backward areas.In addition, this paper has improved and expanded the existing studies from the following aspects:This paper (1) combines the global envelope method and non-radial, non-angle ultra-efficient SBM model to construct the SSBM-Global Malmquist productivity index and the SSBM-Global Luenberger productivity indicator to separately measure the traditional TFP and the green TFP changes of different regions in China, which, compared with the existing literatures, could be more comprehensive to measure the productivity changes of production units, and be more accurate to judge the quality changes of economic growth in different regions; (2) builds an input price system based on regional factor endowment and brings endowment factor into the analysis of water resource efficiency through thecost-efficiency DEA model, which could offer a more meaningful analysis framework for the study of resource efficiency; (3) expands the sample period to 2012, which enables a more complete discussing ofthe changes of the contributionsto China’s labor productivity growth since the 2008 financial crisis, and decomposes the source of inefficiency into traditional factors (capital and labor), resource usage (water and energy) and emissions (water and air pollution), which couldoffer a more comprehensive dimension to evaluate the quality of economic growth of different regions in China.