Market-oriented Reforms, China's Urban Water Industry, Government Regulation

As one of the most important core facility industries in national economy, urban water supply industry is a key to the sustainable development of social economy. Since a long time ago, the undetachable government and enterprise, and the government regulation system under monopolized management caused serious problems, leading to the low efficiency of water supply enterprises, the absence of competition, and the lack of investment on the fundamental facilities, etc. This has become the bottleneck of urban economy and social development. In recent years, with the improvement of urbanization level, the lack of water resource, and stimulation of global fundamental facility enterprise reform, the regulation reform of urban water supply industry and the competition under the environment of marketization in China, have been an inevitable trend.This manuscript first gives a review for the basic theory of government regulation and summarizes the background of the regulation reform, the experience from other countries, This provides a framework for the theoretical analysis of this thesis. Systematic analysis is given to the government regulation reform of urban water industry on the aspects of the regulation system and law of the water supply, the price regulation, the water quality and service regulation, and the water resource and environment regulation. The developmental process of water industry regulation of China is described with emphasis on the market entrance regulation. Meanwhile, the opening and competition model of China's urban water industry is summarized and the existing problems in the urban water regulation reform are analyzed combined with the status of reform in China. In addition, this thesis analyzes the reform in the Shenzhen water industry company that is leading in China's urban water enterprises. Finally, to solve the problems in current water regulation reform, this thesis proposes the following approaches: separate the government and the enterprise; establish efficient regulation system; improve the charted management policy; push the marketization reform of water industry with the focus on the efficiency; pay attention to both social objective and opening of the market; improve the price regulation system; establish reasonable evaluation platform for the performance of the water industry; strengthen the supervision for the pollution of water environment by government.