Urban Residential Water Demand Influencing Factors

China's economy has been developing fast and people's living condition is getting better, residential water demand increases. However, shortage of water resources and serious pollution make it difficult to supply enough residential water for the increasing demand. The objective of this paper aims to find out factors affecting residential water demand, so as to provide some help for resolving the problem.In China, residential water is mostly used indoors, paid mainly by flat prices, and consumption pattern is quite different from developed countries, which make the difference of residential water demand. In this paper, not only residential water demand is analyzed theoretically, but also conducted at macro and micro levels with an example of Nantong city, Jiangsu province.At the macro level, both double-log model and Stone-Geary model of residential water demand of Nantong are established. The result suggests that income plays the more important role than water price to the residential water demand, the increases of water price have little influence on decreasing residential water demand.At the micro level, the selected families are interviewed for their family backgrounds, including members' ages, living area per capita, water consumption pattern, water saving, educational level of the head or his spouse of the household, which are on the basis that family backgrounds are the main reason for different residential water demand. Further, a model of residential water demand is set up on the pooled data collected by the field works. The results are as follows: Firstly, the water price in Nantong is so low that residents pay little attention to their consumption, the influence of water price on residential water demand is not as effective as expected. Secondly, only part of residents know exactly the situation of water resources and water pollution of Nantong, few of them have strong beliefs to save water. Water conservation propaganda and programs exert little effect over residents' beliefs of water conservation, as residents have received little information from propaganda and programs. It is not popular for residents to save water on their own initiative. Thirdly, of all factors in the research, living area per capita of the family has positive effect on residential water demand;shower needs more water than tubs, and families which wash their clothes by washing machine demand more water than by hands;water saving activities can decrease family's residential water demand;in a family, members age from 14 to 60 use more water than old people above 60, and children under 13 use the least water;when educational level of head or his spouse of the household becomes higher, the influence over residential water demand increases first but then declines, and the residential water demand is influenced most by those who with the educational level of junior college. Besides, temperature plays the most important role to residential water demand.To resolve the problems of residential water shortage, some measures should betaken to alleviate the severe situation, such as increasing water price or changing the water price structure, making more efforts on water-conservation propaganda and technological development.