A Research On Pricing Management Of The Sustainable Utilization Of Water In Chinese Urban Areas

Water resource is an important issue to human beings. China is a country in short of water. Recently, the total quantity of water used in China has been steadily increased. Usage of water is not efficient and water pollution deteriorates the shortage. In urban areas, the water industry is more crucial for protecting environment, reducing water usage and its sustainable development. This paper focuses on pricing management of water in Chinese urban areas and tries to find a way which can improve the efficiency of water usage, environment protecting and profits increasing in the water industry. It is vital to the sustainable development in China.The paper has five parts.The first part illustrates the characteristics of the water industry, pricing methods and policies in urban areas. This industry has many traits such as natural monopoly, special price management and so on. The common methods are marginal pricing, average pricing, cost pricing and others. Water pricing management has strong effects due to its policy related operations.The second part is to describe water price management in developed countries. Many countries have been delved into this field and collected plenty of experiences, especially like the United States, Britain, France, and Japan. Their special price management in water industry can give us some meaningful prospective.The third part has talked about the history and current situation of our urban water price management. The history shows that water has developed from a type of free good to commercial goods. During the practices, Government has changed and improved a lot in structure and standard rule for water industry. However, from the sustainable development perspective, it still has a big room for a better improvement.The forth part uses the political objective method to study urban water price management. It has to achieve some political goals like stable market price, energy saving and environment protection and balance contradictions from several aspects which can be solved by using monetary policy, fiscal policy, price management policy and law system. Only price management policy is used in this paper. Water price management has to be considered as a whole concept so that it can reflect the value and the costs including costs in projects and environment. It also can increase price in waste water industry and differentiate the price in different level of quality in water. The paper also has an example in water price management from Nantong and analyses how to solve the problem.The last part gives some management methods to enhance the water industry. Improving working efficiency in government, forcing all kinds of policies to be achieved and promoting enterprises'production efficiency are important to its sustainable development.