Short CommunicationAssessment of sustainable development: A case study of Wuhan as a pilot city in China

- The sustainable development (SD) of Wuhan, a pilot city in China, is evaluated.
- A method of integrating vector angle and Euclidean distance is proposed.
- The coordination and effectiveness of SD are continually improved in 2005-2012.
- R&D funding and external economic environment are key drivers to improve SD.

Building resource-conserving and environmental-friendly society (referred to as “two-oriented society”, TOS) is an important way proposed by the Chinese government to achieve sustainable development. In this paper, a pilot city of constructing TOS in China-Wuhan is taken as a case to evaluate the performance of TOS from 2005 to 2012. Treating the indicators of TOS as multi-dimensional vectors, this paper proposes a methodological framework by integrating the methods of vector angle and Euclidean distance to measure the angle and distance between the vector of annual status of TOS and the vector of planning target of TOS. Based on this, the paper employs coordination (the angle between the two vectors) and effectiveness (the distance between the two vectors) to describe the performance of TOS and its subsystems, including economic development (ED), social and people's well-being (SW), resource consumption (RC), resource recycling (RR), environmental quality (EQ) and pollution control (PC). Moreover, grey relational analysis approach is used to analyse the core factors influencing TOS construction. Results reveal that the performance of TOS in Wuhan is continually improved in the study period while the performance of its subsystems shows several differences: (1) both coordination and effectiveness of TOS, ED and SW keep on improving, while those of EQ fluctuate; (2) the effectiveness of both RR and PC shows a downward trend while the coordination of them fluctuates; (3) the actual value of RC indicators reaches the planning targets. Based on the analysis of determinants, we suggest that strengthening technological ability and adding investment are extremely important to improve the performance of RC and PC. For the sake of improving RR, it is critical to provide more government public expenditure and encourage financial institutions to provide more loans to stimulate and support the businesses. Moreover, increasing the amount of R&D funding and maintaining steady external economic environment are proved to be effective to improve all subsystems of TOS.