Emergy analysis for evaluating sustainability of Chinese economy

In recent years,many fruitful semi quantitative and quantitative approaches have been used to assess sustainability of economic system,but most of them fail to evaluate the effects of environment and resources on economic processes due to imperfect market and externality.Emergy analysis (EMA),which was developed by H.T.Odum,is a broad reaching attempt to quantify the environment and resources in supporting economic activity.In this paper,indices and ratios based on emergy flows are calculated and employed to evaluate the behavior of economic system.The trends of these indices provide useful information about the dynamics of economic systems within the carrying capacity of the environment in which they develop.A new index,emergy based sustainability index (ESI),of measuring regional sustainability is defined and applied to assess Chinese economy.The result of declining ESI values through the investigation period(1978～1998) indicates that the sustainability of economic system in China has been lowered.