Study On Population Carrying Capacity And Sustainable Development Of Economy In The Loess Hilly-gully Area, West Shanxi Province

Sustainable development is the basic strategy, which coordinates the relation among population, resource, environment and economy. In the strategy, population carrying capacity is a problem, the first important and the most practical problem. Research on population carrying capacity, combining with the problem of food security which was caused by the conversion of cropland to forest or grassland in the Loess Hilly-gully Area, West Shanxi Province, was our main object in the paper. The present situation of population carrying capacity was evaluated and its future was forecasted, which aimed at finding the ways to coordinate the relation among population, resource, environment and economy and at promoting sustainable development of economy in this area. There are 5 aspects included in the paper:First of all, based on inspecting the current situation of resource, ecological environment, economy and society in the Loess Hilly-gully Area, West Shanxi Province, the interaction between population carrying capacity and resource, and population carrying capacity and economic development, were analyzed through quantitative method, the result showed that grain yield and national income were separately responsible for 66.2 percent and 55.2 percent of its population carrying capacity.Secondly, according to the different factors, population carrying capacity was divided into three types such as resource population carrying capacity, economic population carrying capacity, resource-economy population carrying capacity; and regression model was used to describe the relation between population carrying capacity and resource or economy. As a result, seen from the relation among them, the population carrying capacity in this area was mainly determined by its resource status; Considering their relative relation, its population carrying capacity was made an evaluation using the two indexes, the harmonious level and deviation, and a conclusion was drawn that the current situation of population carrying capacity in the area had been quite unreasonable, the population pressure was very serious.Thirdly, Logistic and Cubic model were used to predict population carrying capacity in the region. The result indicated that its population carrying capacity, in the coming 10 years, would not be large enough to contain its population.Fourthly, on the basis of specifying the interaction between population carrying capacity and sustainable development of regional economy, the new concept 'Ecological Energy' was put forward and its index system was established in the paper. Factor analysis and Ward Cluster analysis were used to explore the sustainable development of regional economy. As far as the divided types of 'Ecological Energy' were concerned,we held that it was necessary to take the unequal development pattern in the area.At last, some ways were put forward to coordinate the relation among population, resource, environment and economy, and promote sustainable development of regional economy.