Empirical Analysis For The Effect Of Increasing Block Rates Strategy To Household Water Demand

Whether the increasing block rates strategy can effectively improve the water demand and use efficiency of the urban residents or not is the hot spot and focus of the urban residents' domestic water rate reform and research.The existing papers mainly focus on the qualitative analysis on the advantages and disadvantages,and the simulated test on the feasibility of the increasing block rates,but the empirical study on the effect of increasing block rates to residents' domestic water consumption is relatively few.Going from the point of view of the urban residents' domestic water demand,based on the theory of demand function of econometrics,taking the relevant datum from the 2004-2014 Urban Statistical Yearbook,the 2004-2014 Urban Water Supply Statistics Yearbook and related datum over the Internet as the basic datum,through the establishment and estimation of the cascade equation model of the interaction between the increasing block rates and the urban residents' domestic water consumption,this paper discusses the influence of the implementation of the increasing block rates policy on the urban residents' domestic water demand.The empirical results show that:(1)the price elasticity of urban residents ' domestic water demand at the full sample level is-0.3163,which shows increasing the price of domestic water has a certain degree of inhibition on urban residents' domestic water demand;The income elasticity of demand is 0.8239,which indicates that the income level of urban residents has a significant positive impact on urban residents' domestic water demand in the sample area;(2)In order to study the effect of the implementation of the increasing block rates on urban residents' domestic water demand,this paper sets up a dummy variable that indicates whether there is a increasing block rates.The coefficient of the dummy variable is estimated to be-0.2313 by estimating the parameters of the whole sample data,that is,the domestic water demand will decrease by 23.13%after the implementation of increasing block rates policy,and the effectiveness and feasibility of implementing increasing block rates policy are verified;(3)The empirical study on the sample data at the regional level shows that the implementation effect of increasing block rates both in the eastern and western region can effectively restrain the urban residents' domestic water demand.However,the impact of the increasing block rates in the central region is not significant,mainly due to the urban residents' domestic water prices in the central region are lower,and the price differences in the different blocks are small.In the end,this article proposes to improve and actively implement the increasing block rates policy and set more reasonable increasing block rates,and also consider welfare subsidies for different groups.So that we can maximize social benefits.