How Natural Resource-Based Industry Affect Sustainable Development? An Evolutionary Study of China

Liping Fu,Xiaodi Jiang,Lanping He

doi:10.3390/su12010291

Abstract

The effects of natural resources on regional sustainable development is widely discussed by scholars and policymakers. However, most of the researchers concentrated on economic growth and technical development; evidence of how natural resources affect the soft environment is relatively lacking. Different from the neo-classical economics perspective of resource allocation, we used the evolutionary economics scope of factor creation and historical evolution to explore the effect on China’s regional entrepreneurship laid by the natural resource distribution on the early stage of China. The resource curse is explained from the aspect of regional entrepreneurship development in China. Based on the provincial panel data from China, in China’s industrial statistical yearbook and China’s statistical yearbook, we applied PLS-SEM (Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Model) to explore the path from natural resources to regional entrepreneurship. We also examined the mediating effect at the organizational scale, industry structure, the degree of regional openness, and the quality of human capital in the path between natural resource and entrepreneurship. The result shows that natural resources in the early-stage has negative effects on the growth of the entrepreneurship. Besides, industry structure and organizational scale are significant in terms of mediation effect in the path of the resource curse. An in-depth analysis is provided, and implications are discussed based on the results with the aim of revealing the mechanism and path-dependence of China’s regional development. The implications of this research include the suggestion of adapt the industry structure and motivate start-ups.

Highlights

Sustainable development of natural resource-based regions is an emerging research topic, which attracts increasing attention from different fields
In the process of evolution of entrepreneurship, the sufficient natural resource offered the entrepreneur more opportunities to establish their business at first, but the overdependence on the natural resource has been criticized as the main barrier of regional sustainable development
Return to the main theme of introduction, natural resource-based regions that suffered resource curse in terms of sustainable development is attributed to the shortage of regional entrepreneurship

Summary

Introduction

Sustainable development of natural resource-based regions is an emerging research topic, which attracts increasing attention from different fields. The single pattern of development with consumption of natural resource left many crises to such regions, such as the damage of environment, waste of resources, as well as brain drain. Entrepreneurship is dynamically correlated with sustainable development, which contains innovation and start-ups; it would bring competitive advantages to the natural resource-based regions with less consumption of energy and less damage of the focal environment [5]. As the traditional dimensions of entrepreneurship, in regard to the regions agglomerated with natural density resource-based industries, the start-up and self-employee could support sustainable development through industrial upgrading [7]. Chinitz conducted an in-depth comparison of the development paths of New York and Pittsburgh (USA) in the last century and found the advantages of natural resource in the early stage led Pittsburgh to large-scale companies and a hierarchy management system that negatively affected the regional entrepreneurship [9]

Methods

Results

Conclusion