Measuring the Decoupling Progress in Developed and Developing Countries

摘要

The relationship between economic development and the ecological environment is the key to sustainable development of human society. With the rapid economic development, the demand for resources has increased dramatically, which has led to problems such as depletion of resources and environmental pollution. Therefore, the relationship between resource use and economic growth needs to be studied to formulate corresponding resource use policies to facilitate the sustainable development of human society. This paper uses the resource decoupling indicators to study the decoupling condition of domestic material consumption (DMC) and material footprint (MF) indicators of three BRICS countries and three OECD countries from 1990 to 2015. Resources include biomass, non-metallic minerals, fossil fuels, and metal ores. Based on the results from these cases, we find that developed countries have a better decoupling condition than developing countries in the DMC level, but there is not much difference between developed and developing countries at the MF level. The developing countries' decoupling condition of MF is better than that of DMC, while the developed countries' decoupling condition is opposite. This study also emphasizes the importance of developing decoupling policies by selecting an appropriate resource use indicator.