Analysis on the emergy structure and eco-efficiency of the agricultural eco-economic system in Hunan

Emergy theory has its unique advantage in the research of regional economic system's ecological efficiency. Namely, it can integrate ecological system and social economic system into one body so as to conduct unified statistical measurement and analysis on the real value of natural environment and human kind's production activities, and therefore overcoming the shortcoming of only focusing on economic analysis. Based on the reference of previous researchers' research literatures, this paper utilizes the relevent economic, social and environment statistics of Hunan province's Agro-ecological system for the year of 2008, and carries out the computation and data processing of the input and output emergy for this system. And in the meantime, the authors also have analyzed the current situation of the input-output structure, the system's load capacity, and the system's operation efficiency among with other problems. This paper intents to lay a solid foundation for the future further research on the sustainable development of Hunan province's Agro-ecological system. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of RIUDS