Assessing Regional Circular Economy Development: Approaches and Indicator Systems: A Case Study in Jiangsu Province

This paper reviewed the development of circular economy assessment and the related researches and established an analytical framework for assessment of regional circular economy development.In detail,the goal of regional circular economy development comprehensive assessment is to gain a composite index which is comparable,sensitive to the change of assessment factors' value,synthetic.The paper built up an analytic framework named APRP,which means action,pressures,response,and performance.The descriptive assessment and comprehensive assessment were used and the selection principles of assessment indicators and the approaches of indexes weigh determination and the means of index value standardization were developed.According to the selection principle of assessment indicators,the paper established a system of regional circular economy assessment indicators,which mainly included the factors such as resource use efficiency,resource input trend,waste discharge,resource recycling and reusing,industry circular structure,energy consumption and so on.The paper takes Jiangsu Province as case,using three ways of index value standardization to handle the data.The result shows that the circular development degree of Jiangsu Province's economy is increasing gradualy and with remarkable characteristic of phase.Furthermore,there is different performance in Jiangsu Province's circular economy development.In details,there are significant improvement in reducing resource input and reducing waste discharge and notable advancement in resource recycling and reusing.High risk exists in energy consumption structure because of high-proportion dependence on exotic energy.Finally,based on the analysis,the paper gave some suggestions on how to promote Jiangsu Province's circular economy development,which mainly included improving laws rules,readjusting industry structure,accelerating technology development and so on.