Abstract
Water shortage has become a serious problem in the world, and low water efficiency is the key to industrial and agricultural production and sustainable economic development. Based on the data of 30 provinces (municipalities) in China from 2010 to 2017, this study builds a DEA model based on the hybrid network structure of water systems to measure water resource utilization efficiency and uses a difference-in-differences (DID) model to examine the effects of the water rights trading policy on water resource utilization efficiency. We find that the water rights trading policy can significantly promote the total water efficiency of the water resources system and the initial water use efficiency, and after a series of robustness tests, the result is still valid. Further analysis indicates that the policy effect changes with the adjustment of the industrial and agricultural water use structure. Moreover, the dynamic impact of water rights trading policy on water resource utilization efficiency is still significant. This study provides macroscopic evidence for evaluating the effects of China’s water rights trading policy and offers new ideas and experiences for improving China’s water resource utilization efficiency.
Highlights
We find that the initial water use efficiency is higher than the wastewater treatment efficiency, which shows that on the whole, water resources in our country is still in the stage of “treatment after pollution”, and in the water resources management system for the prevention and control of water pollution of policy enforcement, there is still a large room for improvement
The regression results show that the estimator Treat is positive and significant at the 1% level, which indicates that after controlling the other variables, the water rights trading policy improves the overall efficiency of the water resource system in the region by 8.2 percentage points, and improves the initial water use efficiency by 9.0 percentage points compared with the non-water rights trading pilot area
Based on the data of 30 provinces in China from 2010 to 2017, this study builds a DEA model based on the hybrid network structure of water systems to measure water resource utilization efficiency and uses a DID model to examine the effects of water rights trading policy on water resource utilization efficiency
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Water shortage has become a serious problem in the world, and inefficient water use is the key restriction to industrial and agricultural production and sustainable economic development [1,2,3]. In response to the current problem of low water efficiency, governments around the world have successively issued a series of water resources management policies [4,5,6,7]. Since 2000, the Chinese government has introduced a number of policies to achieve the reasonable utilization and effective allocation of water resources [8,9,10,11]
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