Effect of the Stock of Human Capital on the Sustainability of Chinese Society with Economies in Transition

In the past two decades, China has witnessed rapidly economic growth. However, this extensive economic growth pattern has brought about quite a lot resource and environmental problems that might hold economic further development back at present and in near future. Now the emerging issue is how China could balance realization of rapidly economic growth and the sustainability of society in near future, which seems to be very unclear for both policy-makers and scholars. This paper employs some actual data to investigate the impacts of increasing stock of human capital on the realization of the sustainable development in order to assess how the growing capacity in human and social capitals will affect the future sustainability of Chinese society at the process of social and economic transition, which is also of great use for other developing nations like China with huge population size. This paper first of all analyzes the linkage between educational attainment and sustainable development. On one hand, it turns out that the increase of women’s educational level could help decline the fertility and realize Chinese sustainability finally. On the other hand, it indicates some positive correlation between educational attainment and public awareness of sustainable development. Then it studies the role of human capital in the transformation of Chinese economic growth pattern. This paper next studies the indirect effect of human capital via science and technology in the recognition of sustainability and indicates that the development of science and technology will lead to the better harmony between economic growth and the protection of natural resource and environment. Lastly, this paper proposed some policy frameworks in order to realize the goal of sustainable development in China by building up the growing stock of human capital.