Study On Water Resources Pricing

Water is essential for human being, economic activities, and important environmental resources as well. Water crisis endangers the survival and development of the human itself, by affecting the daily life, injuring the health, and hindering the economic development. Severe underpricing of water is one of the main reasons to cause the crisis. Resources, environment and development become the theme of the world's economic development today. It has been paid much attention to allocate water resources by means of market mechanism.This paper dissertated water resources price by taking the sustainable development as the guideline. Firstly, it, based on the natural distribution characteristic of water resources and status of supply and demand of water, analyzed the present situation of water pricing, problems existing, and their reasons, discussed the effect of subsidy policy and the limitation of the property of water, and then put foreward principles for water pricing. Secondly, it stressed on the connotation of water resources value, pointed out that water resources has the economic value, social value, ecological value and scenic value, and further stressed the importance of ecological value, after finishing the comparion study of the theories of resource pricing between the Marxism and the modern economics. Thirdly, having finished the study of the polluted water soure, polluted water control and its external effect, it listed a concrete method for the calculating externality. Fourthly, it discussed the application of the model marginal opportunity cost (MOC) on water pricing, and at the same time, it estimated the composing elements: marginal production cost (MFC), marginal user cost (MUC), and marginal environmental cost (MEC), and then evaluated the feasibility of the model, taking the water pricing of Chibi city as the example. Finally, it brought forward the public policy of water pricing, and emphasized the efficency, justice, and equity, namely water pricing should be benefical to the coordinating, stable, balanced sustainable development between population, economy, resource and environment.The paper strongly emphasized that, a public resources as water is, the economic value of water resources should be recongnized, and what' s more, it should be rooted in our social and cultural tradition. Therefore, as a production factor, water expense should be added into the production cost in economic activities. It is necessary to eliminate subsidy, price on the marginal opportunity cost, pay attention to distribution of water between generations and the internalization of the environment cost. And water policy should be correspound with the renovation of property system, technical renovation, and law system, and then the sustainable development can be ensured.