Abstract
With the advancement of industrialization and urbanization, the issue of water shortage has become a bottleneck for China’s economic development. Based on the structural decomposition analysis and multi-regional input–output tables of China in 2002 and 2012, this paper explores the drivers of the change in China’s production water usage from the regional relevance perspective. Results show a significant increase in China’s production water usage during the study period. The relationship between production water usage and per capita GDP shows an inverted U-shaped curve, and the economic scale by provinces has been improved, while the trend of production water usage differs. There are rapid increases in production water usage in economically developing provinces, while it is falling sharply in developed provinces. The crucial factors promoting its growth are changes in consumption level, population scale, and regional economic patterns. The technical effect is the most important factor in curbing the growth, followed by effects of final demand sectoral and distribution structure. The provinces and sectors with more production water usage shows higher technical and final demand effects. Therefore, it is necessary to promote water-saving activities, enhance the water-saving technical effect, and optimize final demand structure to promote economic growth with low-water usage.
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Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study can be provided on reasonable request.
Notes
The Council Information Office of China held a press conference on February 16, 2012, and invited Hu Siyi, vice minister of the Ministry of Water Resources, to introduce the background and main contents of the “Opinions of the National Council on Implementing the Most Stringent Water Resources Management System.”
According to Zhang (2012), the mainland in China mainly consists of the following eight regions: northeast (NE, including Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning), Beijing-Tianjin region (BT, comprising Beijing and Tianjin), northern coast (NC, including Hebei and Shandong), eastern coast (EC, including Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang), southern coast (SC, including Fujian, Guangdong, and Hainan), central region (CR, including Shanxi, Henan, Anhui, Hubei, Hunan, and Jiangxi), northwest (NW, including Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Ningxia, Gansu, Qinghai, and Xinjiang), and southwest (SW, including Sichuan, Chongqing, Guangxi, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Tibet).
This method takes into account the “non-uniqueness problem” in structural decomposition and has the advantage of simplified operation. It is a structural decomposition method, which is very suitable for empirical analysis (Zhang 2010).
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Acknowledgments
We thank the anonymous referees for their valuable comments to improve the quality of this paper.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant No. 71673083).
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Chao Gao contributed to data curation, formal analysis, and writing of the original draft. Rui Xie contributed to the conceptualization and methodology. Youguo Zhang contributed to the methodology, writing review, and editing. Kunfu Zhu contributed to the conceptualization, writing review, and editing.
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Appendix. Sector classification
Appendix. Sector classification
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Gao, C., Xie, R., Zhang, Y. et al. Drivers of dynamic evolution in provincial production water usage: perspective of regional relevance. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 15130–15146 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-11522-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-11522-4
Keywords
- Regional economic pattern
- Structural decomposition analysis
- Multi-regional input–output model
- Production water usage