Water use efficiency of Jiangsu province based on the data envelopment analysis approach

Abstract

This paper attempts to employ water footprint approach to analysis the real use situation of water resource in Jiangsu Province, and established C2R and BC2 models of data envelopment analysis (DEA) from the input-output perspective, which incorporates agricultural water, industrial water, domestic water, total COD discharge, fixed asset investment and labor as input indicators, and GDP and food production as output indicators to evaluate the water resources use efficiency of Jiangsu Province from the year 2000 to 2010. The results have shown that the water footprint of Jiangsu is 778. 28 m3, indicating a slowly rising trend. In addition, the agricultural water,industrial water and the virtual water trade are major parts of water resource use in Jiangsu Province. The effective year of DEA accounts for 64% during the 11 years, and the redundant inputas well as the insufficient output is zero value, which means that the input-output has achieved the optimal state. While the redundant input in the invalid years of DEA have shown the extra pollution and resources allocation is unreasonable, which can be theoretically resolved to arrive at the optimal equilibrium point through the analysis of the DEA projection.