Should we look forward to green GDP?

Although related ministry of the Chinese government has denied the report by foreign media that China will give up its green GDP program, comments and discussions about the issue are still going on. This is an evidence that green GDP has aroused great attention from the public.

It has been over a year since people started to heatedly discuss the issue. But why hasn't the program been carried out yet? In fact, it is far more difficult than one can imagine. So far, there isn't any country in the world that can calculate their overall resource and environment cost in order to get a complete green GDP. The major difficulty for the environmental economic settlement is how to quantify the value of environmental resources and the government's service function. But the question is whether such a technical difficulty means that we should give up our expectation on green GDP.

In fact, while expecting, there are already some great changes taking place. Many people have begun to talk about whether a new cadre performance appraisal criteria should be set while in the past, they were only keen in economic growth. The mainstream voice is that a new target that can reflect relations between economic development and environment should be established except the traditional GDP.

It is thought-provoking that statistical department in east China's Zhejiang Province issued 'An Analysis of Cost in the Process of Zhejiang's GDP Growth' after its GDP surpassed one trillion yuan, or 125 billion US dollars. The analysis reflects the growth mode of high input, high consumption of energy and other resources and high emission and discharges.

This also shows a change that people have become sober-minded and objective. More and more people have realized that due to over emphasis on GDP and even treating development the same as growth, many unavoidable issues that must be solved have been left unresolved. These issues include the big gap between rural and urban development, between the rich and the poor and relations between resource, environment and development.

The green GDP is in sharp contrast to blindly seeking GDP growth because the former intends to discount the resource and environment cost caused by economic growth. This reflects an important index in sustainable development.

But now the problem is that while we are expecting green GDP, have we simplified the issue too much?

Sustainable development means coordinated development among economic, social and environmental fields. But green GDP in fact puts more emphasis on environmental factor on the basis of GDP and reflects the relations between economy and environment in some sense. However, one shouldn't exaggerate its role because it also has its limitations. The reason is that green GDP can't satisfy requirements from all fields. So far there isn't such a good system yet because it is very difficult to quantify government services which actually hit the limitation of the current system. Perhaps a more democratic way of choosing cadres and appraising their performance in meeting the needs of the people in economic, social, environmental and all the other aspects is needed.

It is undeniable that to expect green GDP is a social progress. But in addition to such a good expectation, one has to be pragmatic to know what can be done and what cannot be done and how to properly use such an ideal in the proper situation. The ideal state is that green GDP can become an important factor and impetus in the process of transferring government functions and building an environment monitoring system.

By People's Daily Online