Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 1021: Industrial Structure Restructuring, Production Factor Allocation Analysis: Based on a Mineral Resource-Intensive City--Jiaozuo City (Sustainability)

The importance of sustainable development of the mineral resources industry is self-evident for the reason of that China’s primary energy consumption structure has not changed. While the development level is not only affected by resource endowment, but also by technology. At this important historical stage—namely, transforming China’s economic growth mode—how to effectively conduct the supply-side reform has a remarkable strategic significance to the national sustainable economic development goal. In general, if we want to seek a sustainable development path for a mineral resource-intensive region, we must answer the binary contradictory relationship between the mineral resources industry. In order to accomplish these targets, we constructed five index layers and selected 14 specific indicators according to the production function followed by using Kolmogorov entropy. Then, we calculated the Pierce coefficient of different industries and the transfer entropy of production factors of some representative industry in different categories. In this way, the structural similarities or differences in the distribution of production factors are empirically examined. The results of our study showed that the industrial layout of the target case—Jiaozuo City—has not been qualitatively changed, most of its industries is still dominated by resources and labor-based enterprises; at the same time, in terms of production factors structure, resource-based industries are not similar to others showing that similarities and differentiation coexisted; the results of transfer entropy revealed that the reason why differences in similarity mainly are R&D expenditures, total investment in fixed assets, and coal consumption.