Abstract
China has long been adopted traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) models to measure water resources utilization efficiency of different provinces and cities without bias correction of efficiency scores. In this study, the Bootstrap-DEA approach embedded 3-stage DEA models was introduced to analyze the comprehensive efficiency of water resources utilization in the different prefecture-level cities Jiangxi and tried to improve the application of this method for benchmarking and inter-regional research. It is found that the bias corrected efficiency scores of Bootstrap-DEA differ significantly from those of the traditional DEA model, which implies that Chinese researchers need to update their DEA models for more scientific calculation of water resources utilization efficiency scores. This research has helped narrow the inter-regional gap in the comprehensive efficiency measurement and improvement of water resources utilization. It is suggested that Bootstrap-DEA embedded 3-stage DEA models be widely applied into afterward research to measure comprehensive efficiency of water resources utilization in regional inter-city so as to better serve for efficiency improvement and related decision making.
Highlights
Jiangxi Province is rich in water resources, but the spatial distribution of water resources is extremely uneven
The Bootstrap-data envelopment analysis (DEA) method can help break the bottleneck by repeated sampling to increase the number of decision-making units (DMUs), in order to make the estimated efficiency scores much closer to their real scores
With DEA efficiency method, the higher comprehensive efficiencies scores of water resource utilization is obtained, while the efficiency scores decreases after the bias corrected by Bootstrap method, implying DEA direct results overestimate the water resource utilization efficiency (WRUE) of Jiangxi Province for recent years, while the bootstrap-DEA method can provide more accurate results than the three-stage DEA method
Summary
Jiangxi Province is rich in water resources, but the spatial distribution of water resources is extremely uneven. Drought and flood disasters occur frequently in Jiangxi Province (Ye & Meng, 2015). Inefficiency of water use further adds to the problem of water environment in Jiangxi Province. According to Jiangxi Water Resources Bulletin, 43.91 billion t of water was discarded in 2017, as compared to 32.79 billion t in 2000, which suggests an increase in the quantity of discarded water, by 33.91%, during these years. The contradiction between supply and demand of water resources is prominent in Jiangxi Province. Utilization efficiency of water resources becomes imperative for Jiangxi Province to maintain a sustainable water supply
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