制度环境与自然资源的可持续利用

论文通过对比包括中国在内的12个国家和地区修正后的国民净储蓄统计量(Adjusted Net Savings,ANS)和总体治理指标(Aggregate Governance Indicators,AGI),分析了处于不同经济发展阶段的国家和地区因制度环境的不同而引起的资源可持续利用上的差异。对比发现,具有良好制度环境的国家和地区其资源的可持续利用表现也较好。另外,文章通过建立制度环境对资源可持续利用影响(剔除双向因果关系)的计量经济模型,证明了制度环境对资源可持续利用的影响显著,这为制度作为经济可持续增长的重要因素提供了一些证据。根据上述研究发现,中国目前的经济符合可持续增长的范畴,而且因制度环境存在潜在的改善空间,如果相关的制度环境不断得到改善,中国的经济水平能够在未来一段时期内保持持续增长。

Institutional Environment and Sustainable Natural Resource Utilization

Seeking sustainable natural resource use and accelerating sustainable economic growth is one of the main tasks for Chinese government in its coming "12th Five-Year Plan" for national economy. Thus, how to find a way to achieve the goal is quite important for the policy makers. In order to provide some scientific evidence for policy recommendations, this paper tries to assess different performance levels of sustainable resource use among different economies due to the different institutional settings through a comparison of two indicators based on the data sets from 12 countries and regions including China. The two indicators are the Adjusted Net Savings (ANS) and Aggregate Governance Indicators (AGI) surveyed and published by the World Bank. The statistic analysis findings are that better institutional settings lead to better performance of sustainable resource use and economic growth. After that, the paper further sets up an econometric model to verify the findings, i.e., good institutional environment is a positive driving factor for sustainable natural resource use, in which the model eliminates the reverse causality of the two factors by using the two stages linear regression method and GLS method for panel data. The result of the regression verifies that there is a significant effect of institutional environment on sustainable resource use, which provides the necessary evidence for the policy makers, i.e., one unit improvement of good institutional environment can lead to a 8.84 times increase of average value of economic growth and the net savings of the country. According to the findings, the paper concludes that because the current growth of Chinese economy falls into the scope of sustainable ones, and meanwhile there is the space for the improvement of institutional settings, the future Chinese economic growth could maintain sustainablility to a certain extent if the related institutional environment is continuously ameliorated.