(262f) The Analysis of Efeg: Eco-Factor of Economy Growth

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is often used as a measure of social welfare, though it is not intended to be so. One shortcoming of this indicator is that it fails to account for ecological declines. Thus Green GDP is proposed, using specific accounting systems such as SEEA. However, it is quite difficult to accurately translate the non-marketed values into marketed ones. Besides, a certain accounting system is only suitable to limited regions with similar characteristics. Under this circumstance, two new indicators, Ecology Consuming Index Q and ECO-Factor of Economy Growth (EFEG) are proposed in this paper.

EFEG=I/Q (Please see the formula of Q at the bottom of the abstract)

where I is GDP index (preceding year=1); Ri is certain natural resource decline index; Ej is certain energy consuming index; Pk is certain pollution increasing index; w1i,w2j,w3k are weight coefficients related to Ri, Ej and Pk respectively ; W1, W2, W3 are weight coefficients related to natural resource decline, energy consuming and pollution increasing respectively.

While GDP measures the economic growth, EFEG measures the healthy degree of the growth. By using EFEG, not only the accurate translations of all non-marketed values into marketed ones are unnecessary, the indicator calculation itself is quite flexible as well. For instance, m, n and p are variations according to how many data we have. The more data we have, the more reliable the result is. For most cases, coal, crude oil, natural gas, pig iron, cement and timber could represent natural resources; annually energy consuming in million tons of standard coal equivalents (SCE) could be found from National Energy Statistical Yearbook; Pollution could be represented by waste water, waste gas and waste residue.

Two kinds of case studies are presented in this paper. One is to study a region's EFEG performance in a series of time span; the other is to compare different regions' EFEG performances during the same time period. The results show that EFEG well represent the economic growth health from ecological aspect. And a multiple indicator system including I, Q and EFEG are further discussed.