Revealing Energy Over-Consumption and Pollutant Over-Emission Behind GDP: A New Multi-criteria Sustainable Measure

This paper develops a new measurement for regional/national sustainable social economic development based on data envelopment analysis. This new measurement can reveal the impact of energy over-consumption and pollutant over-emission on economic development, giving regional/national sustainable development a more proper measure. This new measurement is applied into an empirical study for 10 year (2004–2013) sustainable development analysis of 30 regions in mainland China. The empirical results show that: (1) China has a quite unsustainable development in 2004–2013, and the level of unsustainability increased over time. The primary driver of these two phenomenon is pollutant over-emission and resource over-consumption respectively. (2) Area-wide sustainable development in China is quite unbalanced. Eastern China has a much better sustainable development as compared to other areas, and the variation of Eastern China’s sustainable level is very little in 2004–2013. (3) Resource over-consumption and pollutant over-emission in western China are serious, even the absolute values are quite low. This makes western China develop unsustainably in 2004–2013.