Research Of Urban Water Supply Industry Marketization Reform In China

Urban water supply and drainage system includes the service of water supply, drainage, and waste water treatment process. For a long time, most countries in the world regard urban water supply and wastewater treatment as a public welfare, and was operated and managed directly by local governments. With the progress of technology, change of market demand, shortage of water resources, and inefficiency of traditional monarchy by government, countries around the world initiated a wave of market-oriented reforms for water and wastewater sector.Ever since the reform and opening up of our country, our state government has attempted the reform on water supply and wastewater treatment industry, including issued a series of policies and regulations on market-oriented reform. The specific reforms includes:reform of industry management, investments, operation, ownership and pricing mechanism. Some obvious achievements on total amount levels have also been generated, which gradually meet the social demand on drinking water and wastewater treatment. However, some problems have emerged during the reform process, such as incorrect perception on market-oriented reform for urban water industry, chaos in industry management mechanism, unclear ownership, lack of diversity on investment sources, imperfection of law structure and competing mechanism.Regarding to the various problems emerged during market-oriented reform process of urban water supply and waste water treatment, it is necessary to learn from best practices from other countries. In this thesis, the UK, USA, France and Germany are selected as typical countries, representing completely private ownership, market-oriented, franchise operation, and government-oriented models, respectively. Looking back to their background of reform, summarizing their industry management systems, law frame and supervision system, pricing mechanism, drinking water and water environment quality, it would be obviously to find out their characteristics in common, and to provide rich theoretical and practical knowledge for China’s market-oriented reform on water industry.Based on previous analysis, some suggestions have been proposed on to perfect market-oriented reform of water industry in China, including:setting an integrated management mechanism on the whole industry, leading diversity investment source, perfect market competing mechanism, to promote modern management inside the enterprises, and improve the social service level of the industry. Due to the imbalance of economic development and water resource allocation, the specific method of reform can be differs, to achieve the goal of both efficiency and fair.