"If a thing can be done at the cost of US$1 in the other parts of the world it will require US$1.25 to deal with it in China." This is the newest development cost published Monday by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the "Report on China's strategy for sustainable development". And the higher cost is mainly due to the comparatively inferior resources and environment and the backwardness in economy as pointed out in the report.
What the researchers say about the "development cost" refers to the expenses the state has to spend in the capital and infrastructure construction in order to bring about the booming of economy in the country. The lower the development cost the easier the capital construction and also the easier the accumulation of social wealth. The cost for development is regarded as one of the important indexes to indicate the sustainable development of the area. Judging merely by the housing prices, though the development cost is much higher in Beijing and Shanghai than in other places of the country yet Beijing and Shanghai still remain the places with the lowest development cost according to experts.
As introduced by experts, the development cost in its narrow sense includes mainly the construction cost in building of roads, post and telecommunications, sewage pipelines, network and for education, etc. The development cost in China is restricted by its physical conditions. As compared to the average in other parts of the world the physical conditions in China are quite serious. The average height of China's mainland is 1.83 times the average of the world with relatively more natural calamities. Owing to an inferior development in economy the common wealth is relatively less as accumulated on the per unit area. All this has led to the higher cost in the development.
The higher cost in development has, as a matter of fact, revealed a real situation that China remains still a developing country, experts pointed out. In the 35 indexes, China as one among the countries with a territory of over 7 million square kilometers (China, the USA, Brazil and Russia, etc.) is ranked at the back of them with one third of its indexes placed at the bottom-line.
In the "Report on China's strategy for sustainable development" of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Niu Wenyuan, section chief of the research group cited a piece of remark by a Nobel winner in economics, saying: If China has realized sustainable development none of the other countries in the world will say "can't". This has otherwise indicated a fact that while China achieved world-attracting achievements in recent years it has paid out an unimaginable cost. Nevertheless, what pleases us is that the recent 10 years have witnessed China's development cost on the decrease along with the economic development.
(People?s Daily February 28, 2002)
