Damping effects of water and land constraints on economic growth in basin economic zones

Abstract

As the increasingly scarce resources of production factors, water and land resources have a global and strategic impact on national economic growth. Under the circumstance of increasingly tight water resource constraints, it is an urgent scientific problem to analyze the damping effect of water resources on grain production, and to achieve a “win-win situation” that ensures the stable growth of grain production capacity and the cost saving and efficiency enhancement of water resources. From the perspective of contradictions between supply and demand of water and land resources in Haihe basin, the paper builds the damping coefficient function of water and land resources on economic development basing on the data from 2001 to 2017. The results show that the damping coefficients of the water and land resources in Haihe basin from 2001 to 2017 range from negative 15.79%–36.50%. The water and land resources have become more and more restrictive to the economy. The damping coefficients of water and land resources in Haihe basin fluctuated from 0.0437 in 2001 to 0.0359 in 2011, and the economic growth rate also changed from 14.2425% in 2001 to 18.68% in 2011. This is because of the advancement of science and technology that encourages people to make full use of the substitution effect of resources, to reduce resource consumption to mitigate the constraints brought by water and land resources, and ensure the steady growth of the economy. In 2012, the damping coefficient decreased to the minimum at negative 0.0733, and it's well known that the substitution effect of resource factor has a certain limit, so that technological innovation is needed to balance the constraints caused by resources in this case.