Abstract
Considering the undesirable output, this paper adopted the data envelopment analysis (DEA) model with the slack variable and super efficiency improvement, to measure industrial water utilization efficiency in the Yangtze River Economic Belt. The paper also creatively introduces urbanization level and urban primacy into driver factors’ estimation by stochastic and fixed Tobit models, exploring how urbanization characteristics affected the water utilization in regional industrial production. The results showed that industrial water efficiency has maintained an upward trend during the whole period, while most central and western provinces have shown a U-shaped trend of decreasing first and then rising. However, the industrial water utilization efficiency of central regions is the lowest, and the eastern regions are the highest, catching up with western regions. Utilization efficiency shows an overall convergence during the research period from 2005 to 2017. Regarding the factors’ estimation, both population urbanization and land urbanization negatively affected industrial water utilization efficiency, particularly blind expansion and disorderly development. The urban primacy meant the unbalance of urbanization, which would lead to urban diseases and pollution transfer, while the effects of urban primacy depended on the urbanization level. However, the utilization efficiency of industrial water did not become better automatically along with urbanization development; therefore, the scale and speed of urbanization should be scientifically formulated. The effects of the level of economic development, the advanced industrial structure, and the level of foreign investment are significantly negative.
Highlights
As the most important inland economic belt in China, the Yangtze River Economic Belt spans across 11 provinces and three economic regions as shown in Figure 1, supporting nearly 45% of the total economic output and over 40% of the population with less than a quarter of the country’s land area [1,2]
In the selection of the driving factors of industrial water utilization efficiency in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, we mainly considered the population urbanization and land urbanization as the index of urbanization level
The proportion of non-agricultural population in each province was used to represent the standard of population urbanization, while the urban permanent population represents the degree of population concentration in urban areas
Summary
As the most important inland economic belt in China, the Yangtze River Economic Belt spans across 11 provinces and three economic regions as shown in Figure 1, supporting nearly 45% of the total economic output and over 40% of the population with less than a quarter of the country’s land area [1,2]. A few scholars have considered the spatial effect of water utilization efficiency with the urbanization process, and have verified that the spatial spillover of urbanization level was the primary influencing factor for improving water utilization efficiency [25]. As it is the main body of China’s new urbanization development and the future high-density urbanization cluster, the limited water resources and fragile water ecological environment will become a serious obstacle to the urbanization process of the Yangtze River Economic Belt [26,27]. More targeted policy measures are proposed to promote the double control of water resources and high-quality, green, coordinated development
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