| Water shortage and water pollution have always been the major issues all over the world nowadays.China,one of the country with severe drought and water shortages,is experiencing the severe water pollution recently especially with the acceleration of urbanization.Huaihe River is an important production base both of agriculture and industry in China.However,with the rapid development of economy and urbanization,various resources problems arise gradually including water resources shortage,water pollution,ecological deterioration and storage inefficiency.How to improve the utilization efficiency of water resources is the key problem among scholars.Thus,in this paper we further investigate the relationship between urbanization and utilization efficiency of water resources of Huaihe River basin,which contributes to the solution of the contraction between necessity of urbanization development in Huaihe River Basin and its appearing water pollution.In addition,the results reported about how to improve water utilization when urbanization are clearly application in our context of Huaihe River Basin,but may also have implications for other areas whose economic development and environmental protection are not coordinated.Firstly,we presented a review and a short assessment of existing relevant literature on water resources utilization efficiency and its impact factors from the aspect of urbanization,which help us to ensure the structure and direction of this study.Drawing on the relative theory literature on urbanization and water resources utilization,this paper clarifies the connotation of urbanization and utilization efficiency of water resources and introduces the theory background.According to these work and the relevant findings of other scholars about urbanization's impacts on water utilization,this study proposed one impact path of influences of urbanization: population changing,industrial restructuring,technology development and economic growth.It is one of the theoretical paths that the urbanization exerted influence on the efficiency of water resources.Secondly,after analyzing the regional characteristics of urbanization development of Huaihe River Basin,we constructed a comprehensive evaluation index system.Integrating the entropy weight method and TOPSIS,we used synthetical index method to measure the index of urbanization development of the Huaihe River Basin during the year 2010-2014.The results suggest that the urbanization rate of Huaihe River Basin is accelerating whereas the developmental level is low as a whole and differs greatly across time and space.Specifically,capital cities have a higher level of urbanization such as Zhengzhou,Hefei and Nanjing than small cities' such as Xinyang,Zhoukou,Zhumadian.Based on the deep analysis of the water resources in the Huaihe River Basin,we use Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA)to measure three dimensional water utilization efficiency including comprehensive efficiency,pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency in the Huaihe River Basin from the year 2010 to 2014.The results demonstrated some issues including the decreasing amount of water resources,the single channel of water supply,relying on agricultural and water pollution.The utilization efficiency is low and varies across time and space.Specifically,the comprehensive utilization efficiency of water resources and the pure technical efficiency showed the characteristics of an inverted-U shape.In addition,the comprehensive utilization efficiency of water resources in most cities is still below the 0.5 level;the overall utilization level of water resources is low;the scale efficiency of water resources utilization is low;most of the urban water utilization is in the condition of constant returns and declines in scale;only a small number of cities' scale promotion can increase their output,and there is a big difference in the value of water utilization efficiency among the cities.Finally,the static panel model and the dynamic panel model are established respectively to explore the impacts of the urbanization on water utilization efficiency,the pure technical efficiency and the scale efficiency of the Huaihe River Basin.The results suggest that the development of urbanization in the Huaihe River Basin exerts a negative influence on the comprehensive utilization efficiency of water resources,pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency among which the impacts on comprehensive utilization efficiency and pure technical efficiency of water resources are larger than impacts on the scale efficiency of water resources utilization.This study also confirms the impact path of influence of urbanization: population changing,industrial restructuring,technology development and economic growth.Specifically,population agglomeration and technological progress can promote the utilization efficiency of water resources,while the industrial structure while economic growth decrease that.According to the result of empirical study,we finally provided some guidance and suggestions in how to optimize the urbanization model and how to enhance the utilization efficiency of water resources. |
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