College of Economics and Management, Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University, Yangling, 712100, China.
Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2022 Jan;29(5):6886-6899. doi: 10.1007/s11356-021-16053-0. Epub 2021 Aug 30.
Economies that depend on natural resources can experience a resource drag effect when economic growth is limited by constraints on the availability of those resources. Therefore, this study uses panel data and the improved Solow growth model to explore the resource drag effect on China's regional economic growth from 1987 to 2017 and makes innovative contributions to address these four gaps in the previous literature: the resources gap, the consistent measurement gap, the regional gap, and the temporal gap. The empirical results indicate that the resource drag effect reduced China's overall annual economic growth by 0.58% during the study period, with reductions of 1.07%, 0.29%, 0.79%, and 0.46% in the Eastern, Western, Central, and Northeastern regions, respectively. In the meantime, the resources drag effect changed in individual regions and across regions. The results on energy drag are most notable. Policies such as "West-to-East Electricity Transmission" and "West-to-East Gas Transmission" promoted economic growth of the Eastern and Western Region, facilitating continued growth in both regions and attracted the return of labor to the Western region. The results indicate that the policies such as west-to-east energy transfer for helping to even out the economic growth conditions in different regions. Labor force mobility has also been important to alleviate resource dependence of agricultural production in Central regain, while other regions have managed to continually grow through improvements in inefficiency. Also, growth in some regions/provinces continues to depend upon increases in water, land, and energy availability and export. This will become increasingly problematic as the social prices of these inputs rise to account for environmental damage. Therefore, the government should adjust the industrial structure of each region to optimize use of resource endowments, alleviate dependence on natural resources, and achieve sustainable economic development.
依赖自然资源的经济体在经济增长受到这些资源供应限制时可能会经历资源拖累效应。因此，本研究使用面板数据和改进的索洛增长模型，从 1987 年到 2017 年，探讨了资源拖累效应对中国区域经济增长的影响，创新性地解决了之前文献中的四个空白：资源空白、一致衡量空白、区域空白和时间空白。实证结果表明，在研究期间，资源拖累效应使中国整体年经济增长率降低了 0.58%，东部、西部、中部和东北地区分别降低了 1.07%、0.29%、0.79%和 0.46%。同时，资源拖累效应在各个地区和各地区之间发生了变化。能源拖累的结果最为显著。“西电东送”和“西气东输”等政策促进了东部和西部地区的经济增长，推动了两个地区的持续增长，并吸引了劳动力回流到西部地区。结果表明，这些能源转移政策有助于平衡不同地区的经济增长条件。劳动力流动对于缓解中部地区农业生产对资源的依赖也很重要，而其他地区则通过提高效率来实现持续增长。此外，一些地区/省份的增长仍然依赖于水、土地和能源供应的增加和出口。随着这些投入的社会价格上涨以弥补环境破坏，这将变得越来越成问题。因此，政府应该调整每个地区的产业结构，优化资源禀赋的利用，减轻对自然资源的依赖，实现可持续经济发展。
