China's Industrial Sector Analysis Of Virtual Water Trade

Water resources are essential to human survival and development, which are also the necessary condition to maintain ecological environment. With the rapid development of human society and economy, the contradiction of water resources is increasingly prominent so that countries and regions all over the world have to face the enormous challenges in the development of the society and economy. In the background of deepening economic globalization and rapid development of the international trade, physical import and export trade in our country present the trend of increasing year by year. Among them, the industrial sector plays an important role in the import and export trade. At the same time, during the large-scale industrial production in China, the industrial departments not only consume large amounts of water, but also produce a large amount of industrial waste water. It is important for the country, like China, which is lack of water resources to use rationally and protect water resources scientificly.On the one hand, water use and consumption are reflected as entity water use. On the other hand, a large amount of water contained as the form of "invisible" in the production process of all kinds of products and services. In 1993, John Anthony Allan firstly defined the "invisible" water as virtual water. The concept of virtual water attracted high attention when it was put forward and it provided a new perspective for the research of water resources utilization and sustainable development. After that, quantitative analysis have a great progress in the virtual water, virtual water management, virtual water trade, food security and so on. Virtual water trade is aimed at trading the water resources implied in the material object, thereby alleviating the water pressure in some regions. Based on the concept of virtual water and virtual water trade, in 2002, the Dutch scholar Hoekstra put forward the concept of water footprint for the first time explicitly in the international virtual water trade meeting in the Netherlands. With the concept of the water footprint is known throughout the world, it was also paid the attention of the governments and developed from pure theoretical research into the policy-making level. This paper uses input-output technology to calculate and evaluate water footprint of our country's industrial departments, analyzes the factors that influence virtual water trade of industrial departments, and then provides certain data basis for water resources security, social and economy development and industrial structure strategic adjustment accordingly.Firstly, this paper introduces the development of water footprint calculation model, and then establishes the object-value hybrid input-output model of water resources through reference the related research results in domestic and overseas. On this basis, this paper calculates and analyzes strength coefficient of water, the water footprint and virtual water quantity of China's industrial sector in the year of 2009,2010 and 2011.This study shows that there is huge difference in strength coefficient of water, but the water coefficient of each department reduced year by year, which suggested that all departments have strengthened the water saving consciousness, improved the innovation of water-saving technologies, intensified the efforts on water saving, so as to improve the water use efficiency, reduce the consumption of water resources. Besides the total water footprint quantity of industrial departments is increasing year by year, and each department's water footprint and its changing trend are not the same. Whereas the internal water footprint of most of the departments have bigger proportion, which shows that most of the departments mainly use of water resources and intermediate input in domestic, so as to less use imports as intermediate input or final demand. This paper analyzes the current situation of virtual water trade which is the focus in this paper from two aspects:virtual water scale and virtual water trade department structure. In scale, virtual water trade of industrial departments appear increasing year by year, but the virtual water exports are always more than imports, which shows that the industrial sector has been in the output of water resources in our country, so as to worsen the deterioration of the situation of water resources scarcity; In structure, for the virtual water of each department, there is no big change for the proportion of virtual water of the whole industry.Secondly, this paper uses LMDI to analyze the change of virtual water from scale, structure and water use intensity. It shows that the scale effect is the largest factor to impact on the virtual water trade change, and the effect of water use intensity is the second factor which its effect is negative, and then the impact of structure effect is the minimum factor, which its effect is positive or negative.Lastly, this paper gives some related suggestion to the development of virtual water trade respectively from the trade scale, technological innovation and popularization, import and export of industrial structure and consumption and investment structure. The purpose of this paper is aiming to reduce the output of the domestic virtual water and guarantee the sustainable development of water resources and economy in our country.