Is Urban Economic Output Decoupling from Water Use in Developing Countries?—Empirical Analysis of Beijing and Shanghai, China

Xiaowei Wang,Rongrong Li

doi:10.3390/w11071335

Xiaowei Wang, Rongrong Li

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/w11071335

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Abstract

Water issue is one of the challenges of urban sustainability in developing countries. To address the conflict between urban water use and economic development, it is required to better understand the decoupling states between them and the driving forces behind these decoupling states. The transformed Tapio decoupling model is applied in this paper to study the decoupling relationship between urban industrial water consumption and economic growth in Beijing and Shanghai, two megacities in China, in 2003–2016. The factors driving decoupling are divided into industrial structure effect, industrial water utilization intensity effect, economic development level effect, and population size effect through Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) method. The results show that: (1) the decoupling states of total water consumption and economic growth in Beijing and Shanghai are mainly strong decoupling and weak decoupling. In comparison, Shanghai’s decoupling effect is better than Beijing; (2) regarding decoupling elasticity, Beijing is higher than that of Shanghai in tertiary industry and lower in primary industry and secondary industry. As a result, Beijing’s decoupling level is worse than Shanghai in tertiary industry, while better in primary industry and secondary industry; (3) The common factors that drive the two megacities’ decoupling are industrial structure effect and industrial water utilization intensity effect. The effects of economic development level and population size mainly present weak decoupling in two megacities, but the decoupling state is optimized year by year. Finally, based on the results, some suggestions for achieving the sustainable development of urban water use are proposed.

Highlights

Human life and production and social economic development are closely connected with water resources, whose development can be hardly achieved without water resources support
2.2, and we found the current researches mainly focus onand themost relationship between economic growth energythat consumption and environmental pollution, of them between economic growth and energy consumption and economic environmental pollution, most of them involve the relationship between carbon emissions and growth
This paper mainly studies the decoupling between water consumption and economic growth in Beijing and Shanghai

Summary

Introduction

Human life and production and social economic development are closely connected with water resources, whose development can be hardly achieved without water resources support. Water is an important factor in supporting economic growth [1]. The per capita resource of developing countries is relatively low, implying a serious shortage of water resources. As the world’s largest developing country, China maintains rapid economic structure growth and has become the world’s second largest economy. China’s per capita water resources are only 2300 m3 —about one quarter of the world’s per capita water resources. As one of the 13 water-deficient countries in the world, China can maintain its leading economic development, reflecting that the growth rate of urban water use is lower than the speed of

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