Seeking sustainable natural resource use and accelerating sustainable economic growth is one of the main tasks for Chinese government in its coming "12th Five-Year Plan" for national economy. Thus, how to find a way to achieve the goal is quite important for the policy makers. In order to provide some scientific evidence for policy recommendations, this paper tries to assess different performance levels of sustainable resource use among different economies due to the different institutional settings through a comparison of two indicators based on the data sets from 12 countries and regions including China. The two indicators are the Adjusted Net Savings (ANS) and Aggregate Governance Indicators (AGI) surveyed and published by the World Bank. The statistic analysis findings are that better institutional settings lead to better performance of sustainable resource use and economic growth. After that, the paper further sets up an econometric model to verify the findings, i.e., good institutional environment is a positive driving factor for sustainable natural resource use, in which the model eliminates the reverse causality of the two factors by using the two stages linear regression method and GLS method for panel data. The result of the regression verifies that there is a significant effect of institutional environment on sustainable resource use, which provides the necessary evidence for the policy makers, i.e., one unit improvement of good institutional environment can lead to a 8.84 times increase of average value of economic growth and the net savings of the country. According to the findings, the paper concludes that because the current growth of Chinese economy falls into the scope of sustainable ones, and meanwhile there is the space for the improvement of institutional settings, the future Chinese economic growth could maintain sustainablility to a certain extent if the related institutional environment is continuously ameliorated.