Spatio-temporal disparity of water use efficiency and its influencing factors in energy production in China

Abstract

Water resources are considered as the biggest obstacle to regional high-quality development in China. Increasing water use efficiency (WUE) is an effective way to alleviate the growing water scarcity. The study concentrates on the energy production in China, uses the input-output analysis (IOA), data envelopment analysis (DEA), and geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR), to determine the total water use, to measure WUE, and to identify the main influencing factors. The results indicated that water consumption exhibit an overall increasing trend, decreasing from the southeastern regions to the southwestern, the northeastern, and the northwestern regions, with an increasing proportion of intermediate input. Although WUE improves significantly from 2002 to 2015, there is still a large space for improvement. Globally, WUE is highly clustered in most regions, and the degree of clustering shows a continuously increasing trend. Locally, the coastal regions in north of the Yangtze River have higher efficiency, while regions in the northwestern and southwestern have lower efficiency. The positive influences of population size, economic level, and industrial structure are significant, and the negative influence of resource endowment is also significant. The influences of resource endowment, population size, economic level, and industrial structure are significantly non-stationary in both space and time, and the former is stronger than the latter. Overall, economic level and population size are the predominant factors, and their quantitative structures are extremely stable.