Assessment of the Sustainable Development Capacity with the Entropy Weight Coefficient Method

Abstract

Sustainable development is widely accepted in the world. How to reflect the sustainable development capacity of a region is an important issue for enacting policies and plans. An index system for capacity assessment is established by employing the Entropy Weight Coefficient method. The results indicate that the sustainable development capacity of Shandong Province is improving in terms of its economy subsystem, resource subsystem, and society subsystem whilst degrading in its environment subsystem. Shandong Province has shown the general trend towards sustainable development. However, the sustainable development capacity can be constrained by the resources such as energy, land, water, as well as environmental protection. These issues are induced by the economy development model, the security of energy supply, the level of new energy development, the end-of-pipe control of pollution, and the level of science and technology commercialization. Efforts are required to accelerate the development of the tertiary industry, the commercialization of high technology, the development of new energy and renewable energy, and the structure OPEN ACCESS Sustainability 2015, 7 13543 optimization of energy mix. Long-term measures need to be established for the ecosystem and environment protection.

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Urban Sustainable Development in China Based on the TOPSIS-Entropy Method

“…Local/urban Li et al [26], Moussiopoulos et al [27], Yin et al [32], Musakwa W. et al [28], Zhao et al [29], Shen et al [30], Chen et al [25], Wang et al [31] Regional Shen et al [33], Zhan et al [34], Wang et al [35], Zhou et al [19], Xu et al [36], Tan et al [37] National the United States [30], Wursthorn et al [38], Shi et al [39], Grzebyk et al [9], Bolcárová et al [10] International UNCSD [3], UNEP [5], the Word Bank [6], European Commission [7,8] Standardizing, weighting and aggregating are usually the basic process of urban sustainable development assessment [2]. The weighting methods, which are the critical step of evaluation, can be mainly divided into two categories.…”

“…In Table 2, in addition to indicators adopted by the majority of the existing literature [25,[29][30][31]36,37], several important indicators are also used in this paper, such as "water coverage", "teacher-student ratio in middle school", "number of health workers per 10,000 persons", "total retail sales of consumer goods per capita" and "industrial waste water emissions per 10,000 output value". The respectively reasons for inclusion and consideration of these five indicators are elaborated as follows: (1) water coverage is the basic guarantee of people's life and an indicator necessary to be considered due to the water shortage problem existing in China; (2) the quality of education not only depends on the commonly adopted indicator of number or rate of students, but also on the teacher-student ratio which can help guarantee the quality of education; (3) both the number of health workers and beds per capita are of importance, and as the two factors show the strong positive correlation through correlation analysis, in this study, the former is chosen because of the critical role of doctors in hospitals; (4) consumption has direct and indirect effects on economic growth, and total retail sale of consumer goods per capita is an economic indicator that reflects the consumption level per capita; and (5) both waste water and waste gas emissions have bad effects on environment.…”

“…This method possibly tends to exaggerate or reduce the effects of certain indicators, and easily leads to reflecting the relationship among indicators inaccurately. The other is the objective method, which determines the weight of each index based on internal relationship and variation degree among different indicators, can effectively avoid deviation of human factors, includes principal component analysis (PCA) [9,10], the entropy method [19,[29][30][31], grey relational analysis [25] and the factor analysis [44].…”

Comprehensive Evaluation of the Sustainable Development of Power Grid Enterprises Based on the Model of Fuzzy Group Ideal Point Method and Combination Weighting Method with Improved Group Order Relation Method and Entropy Weight Method

“…Entropy weight method is the method of determining criteria weight according to the magnitude of information load of each criterion [30][31][32][33].…”

Comprehensive Evaluation of Coordination Development for Regional Power Grid and Renewable Energy Power Supply Based on Improved Matter Element Extension and TOPSIS Method for Sustainability

“…According to the principle of information theory, information is used to measure the order degree of the system, and entropy is used to measure the disorder degree [24][25][26].…”