Green industry development in China: An index based assessment from perspectives of both current performance and historical effort

Green economy has become mainstream in the world's development, and green industry development is becoming increasingly urgent especially in China for achieving its sustainable development goals. Through combining the actual demand of China's green industry development and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), this study established a comprehensive index system, including economic growth, social stability, and environmental friendliness. Different from previous studies that only consider one index in evaluation of the green industry development level, this study proposes an evaluation framework with two composite indices from two perspectives, to comprehensively assess the green industry development level of 18 China's high-industrialized provinces during the period of 2011–2015. One is the Green Industry Performance (GIPer) index to assess the current performance, and the other is Green Industry Progress (GIPro) index to reflect the historical effort in green transformation. As far as we know, our comprehensive assessment combining the two perspectives is the first study of this kind in the research field of green industry development. Then, by comparing the values of GIPer and GIPro of each province with the median values, all evaluated provinces are classified as advanced or backward in terms of current performance, and classified as active or passive in terms of the progress in green transformation. Four categories (in combination of these two indices), which are “advanced-active”, “advanced-passive”, “backward-active” and “backward-passive", are determined. In each category, the key indicators restricting for green industry development of every province are identified, and corresponding policy recommendation is put forward to enhance green industry development.