Proceedings of 13th Asian Business Research Conference
26 - 27 December, 2015, BIAM Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh, ISBN: 978-1-922069-93-1
Sustainability Assessment at Prefecture-Level Cities in China
Using the TOPSIS Model with Entropy Weights
1, 2
Li Bo
3*
and Hasnat Dewan
Sustainable development is a multidimensional concept. Many different sets of
sustainability indicators including some composite indices have been developed over the
years to measure the level of sustainable development in a place. None of the indices has
universal acceptance. This paper attempts to evaluate the level of sustainable
development at 242 representative prefecture-level cities in China using a multi-criteria
decision making method, TOPSIS, with entropy weights. One of the advantages of TOPSIS
method is that it uses cost benefit approach with importance weights of the indices. In order
to construct the sustainability evaluation index system, we use 46 indices under 11 criteria
that belong to 3 subsystems – economic, social, and resource and environmental. The
results show that the Spearman rank-correlation coefficient between the sustainability
ranking of cities based on TOPSIS model and the ranking based on per capita GDP is only
0.43, while that between sustainability ranking and GDP ranking is 0.81 with a rank
difference as high as 230. The implication of these results is that per capita GDP alone is
not a good indicator of the level of sustainable development.
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1
International College of Business and Technology, Tianjin University of Technology, Tianjin 300384, China
Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, China Academy of Science, Beijing
100101,China
3 The Department of Economics, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC V2C 0C8, Canada
* Corresponding author, Email: hdewan@tru.ca
2