A Study On Coordinated Development Between Economic And Environment In Ethnic Minority Areas

After years of reforming and opening policy, China's economy has increased at a high speed, but it was at our country's great expense, which resulted in many growing issues on resource and environment. The economy in the ethnic minority areas has been developing quickly, especially since China committed the national developing strategies in western China. It brings out good achievements that the average speed of development is higher than that in whole nation, eastern and central China. However, the economy is still based on rough modules, with the poor uses of the resources in western China. Some high energy-consuming and high polluting enterprises were moving into ethnic minority areas, leading to some increasingly urgent issues among local resources, environment and industrial enhancement. Nevertheless, there are few literatures aiming at evaluating economic increase achievement by the constraint of environment in China's ethnic minority areas. Therefore, this paper had chosen 10 minority-intensive provinces as study objects, and then evaluated coordinated development between economic and environment and its influences. Nonparametric Directional Distance Function (DDF) is employed by two models (i.e. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Network DEA) to calculate Environmental Technical Efficiency (ETE) and Environmental Total Factor Productivity (TFP). Finally, Frontier Production Function model is constructed to investigate the source of the industrial increase in China's ethnic minority areas. The aim of this paper is to choose an analytic frame which reasonably examines industrial profits and achievements, let us recognized the relationship between environment and economic increase, and clarify the cost of controlling the environment. At the same time, good suggestions are need to keep the economy in ethnic minority areas going better and faster, founding a resource-saving and environment-intimate society. Meanwhile, it is helpful in the local economic development, social steadiness and the construction of harmonious society. The paper consists of the following findings.(1) The paper adopts the empirical approach to analyze the economical increase and general situation of resources and environment in ethnic minority areas. In ethnic minority areas, the fast development from 1998 to 2012 had resulted in the rising of economic share, but the economical gap became wider between its average level and the whole nation's and other places'. The investment of labor force, steady capital investment and available consuming energy had also been increasing quickly. The local poor ecological environment leaded to the poor usage of the resources. The pollution emissions were much lower than the eastern and central China, but their increment and speed were higher than that of the whole nation and other areas. Those indicated the imbalance of the economy development resource and environment.(2) A Network DEA was applied to calculate industrial TFP, and this paper compared the differences of TFP between the traditional DEA and Network DEA. As a result, Network DEA had the win-win advantage both in production efficiency and environment improvement, because it considered the course of production and the realization of best reduction of pollution in the environmental management simultaneously. Therefore, we've drawn a conclusion that Network DEA model is better, which is the new finding in the paper. Adopting the two methods to examine the industrial TFP in ethnic minority areas indicates that TFP was promoted by technology improvement, but no obvious evidence in efficiency. Later on, through the study the value coming from Network DEA and that of TFP without consideration of environmental factors, the ratio showed a rising trend that proved that the pollution had been controlled, the whole environmental technique had been better and the entire technology had been improved obviously considering industrial comprehensive development, environment investment and SO2 emissions.(3) The testament of industrial environmental TFP factors under the environment control showed that the average industrial output had no obvious positive effect on industrial TFP. The introduction foreign investment, large and medium enterprises had a negative effect on it. Better scaled industrial enterprises were beneficial to the enhancement the TFP in ethnic minority areas. A high proportion of heavy industry may lead to a low TFP. On the contrary, a high capital per labor and a high technology purchase proportion in large and medium enterprise would greatly improvement in TFP in ethnic minority areas.(4) Through two dimensional analyses of the ETE and NETE and the static and dynamic perspective, it showed that the coordinated development tested by ETE was getting down among the provinces in ethnic minority areas, while that tested by NETE was getting better, and the improvement of environment control would happen by the raise of ETE. Raising capital organization was helpful to increase the ETE both in two models. The NETE indicated that the raise of industry value share could improve ETE. The raise of residents' production was positive to improve NETE. The enhancement of heavy industry may destroy the coordinated development between industry and environment.(5) This paper constructs a Directional Environmental Frontier Production Function Model to disintegrate frontier output and analyze the effects of environmental TFP, factor investment, environment control and industrial environment structure on the industrial increase transformation pattern in ethnic minority areas. Some conclusions were drawn as follows. The increase of environmental TFP was the key factor of the industry increase. The environmental TFP mostly benefits the contribution of the industrial output in Yunnan, while that in Guizhou and Gansu was declining. Factor investment played a great role in industrial increase. The change of factor investment in Chongqing and Sichuan mostly affected the marginal utility in local industry output, while it showed negative effect in Xinjiang. The effect on environmental control was not obvious, but generally speaking, the effect of the environmental control of industry enhancement was declining. The worsening industrial structure had led to a decline of 1.07percent in its output, which showed that the industrial structure was worsening and the output had been declined. On the whole, based on the four factors' effects on the local frontier industry output, the environmental TFP was increasing, factor resources had rational distribution, the industrial structures was improved, environmental control of the industrial enhancement was declining, and its pattern had been changing from waste-emission to environment-intimate in ethnic minority areas. Finally, Qinghai was taken as an example to analyze its industrial increase pattern.