Research On Construction And Application Of The Harmonious Society Index

Since the reform and opening up, enormous changes have taken place in China’s economy, with remarkable achievements in all construction projects. At the same time, the social and environmental pressure, various contradictions and problems have gradually being emerged, and they may become more complex and outstanding. The concept of a harmonious society was developed against this background, it reflects the CPC’s new recognition and understanding of the development rules of the socialist endertakings as well as governing rules, abilities, strategies and approaches, and provides new guidelines to realize the goal of socialist modernization. Constructing a harmonious society index and doing an empirical study accordingly will not only help people and governments at all levels change the idea of simply pursuing GDP, but also assist implementing the requirement of "perfecting the evaluation system of development achievements and correcting the tendency of evaluating the government performance only based on the speed of economic growth", which was determined in the decision document of the Third Plenary Session of the18th Central Committee of the CPC. Meanwhile, this study can also fully reflect the objective and dynamic process of constructing a harmonious society in all regions over the past years, so as to greatly facilitate more plans in large scale and in the long run to promote scientific constructions related to a harmonious society.This thesis constructs a comprehensive evaluation system framework of a harmonious society based on its connotations, system structure and function mechanism, as well as comprehensive evaluation theory, etc. With the system test, results measurement and conclusion analysis, a complet research is carried on from two aspects of characteristics and influencing factors on the conditions of constructing a harmonious society around the nation and in each province. What’s more, the first comprehensive evaluation software in the nation for a harmonious society is designed and developed. The main work and conclusions are as follows:Firstly, it clarifies the theoretical basis of the harmonious society evaluation. Based on reviewing the studies on social development evaluation and comprehensive evaluation of a harmonious society, the basic features and system constitution of a harmonious society are evaluated from the connotation.Secondly, it builds up a harmonious society evaluation system based on the PSR framework. The analysis shows that this new evaluation system has been greatly improved in ideas, logical hierarchy and indicator selecting. It not only ensures the structural relationship as a whole or in parts, but also keeps logical link in causes and effects. Indicator selecting follows the way of matching in pairs, which ensures close links among all dimensions and helps improve scientific validity of the calculation results from the source.Thirdly, it estimates the harmonious society index, and figures out the features of the national and provincial harmonious society indexes. According to the indicator system of harmonious society evaluation, after the steps of selecting indicators, testing the system and estimating the weights of indicators, the national harmonious society index and each provincial harmonious society index are estimated from2007to2012. First, it defines the characteristics of the index, and chooses the specific classification method. Then, it analyzes the descriptive characteristics of the harmonious society sub-index and the total index. The result shows that there exists great differences among harmonious society sub-indexes, and each province’s index varies widely over the past years, with the feature named "east is better than that of the west, and north is lower than the south." After that, it analyzes the spatial and temporal characteristics of a harmonious society indexes by using the Logistic Model and the clustering method of multi-variable panel data. The result indicates that there exists time point’s difference when different provinces enter various development stages to a harmonious society, except for the cycle of various stages. The number of the provinces cluster number is the same as that of the traditional geographical divisions, but each cluster includes far different provinces. Class I includes only Beijing and Shanghai. Provinces included in Class Ⅲ are basically the provinces in central China, together with Guangdong Province in the eastern district. In addition, Class IV consists mainly of major provinces in the western and northeastern regions of China.Fourthly, it analyzes the impact factors of a harmonious society index. By analyzing and categorizing the sources of various impact factors, with the gray correlation model, the Moran’s I index and the spatial lag model and the spatial error model, to analyze temporal, spatial and temporal-spatial mixing factors. The results show that the level of economic development and social disparity are two more important dynamic impact factors, and location is the most important spatial impact factor. In addition, the current GDP growth, employment average labor pay, the income gap between urban and rural and consumption expenditure ratio have significant positive spatial diffusion (spillover) effects and strong spatial dependence effect to the harmonious society index among different provinces.Fifthly, it designs and develops "a comprehensive evaluation system for a harmonious society". It is a piece of very convenient and pratical software. This evaluation system is mainly programmed and developed from three aspects of the dimension selection, data input and calculation, and results analysis. Besides, it designs an implementation plan of the harmonious society index from the aspects of the index report, report publication and databases set-up, so that the comprehensive evaluation theories of a harmonious society are more realistic and operational.Sixthly, it builds an overall system and subsystems evolution simulation models of a harmonious society, and proposes suggestions according to simulating the evolution of a harmonious society with numerical fitting and policies simulataion. It constructs the simulation model of a harmonious society from the economic, social and environmental system, and each system can undergo the model error checking and sensitivity test. Meanwhile, the policies included in three systems are reorganized into10categories and simulated separately. According to their impact on effect, these four policies, named income policy, public security policy, employment policy and environmental policy, are the most important policies, and the less important policies are health policy, consumer policy and education policy.At the end, it proposes some suggestions. Governments at all levels should narrow the income gap between urban and rural residents by expanding employment, strengthen environmental protection and anti-corruption campaign, and reduce the system pressure to construct a harmonious society from the source. Governments at all levels should optimize the structure of residents’commodity housing supply, promote the coordinated development of all regions, and maintain a nice development trend in the construction of a harmonious society. Governments at all levels should also strengthen security measures of a harmonious society with better social safety supervision, improving the social security system and social harmony evaluation system. Thus, we can realize a harmonious society as early as possible and make the China’s Dream come true.