Evaluation of Water Use Efficiency of 31 Provinces and Municipalities in China Using Multi-Level Entropy Weight Method Synthesized Indexes and Data Envelopment Analysis

Boyang Sun, Xiaohua Yang, Yipeng Zhang and Xiaojuan Chen
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Boyang Sun: School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Xiaohua Yang: School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Yipeng Zhang: School of Economics and Resources Management, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Xiaojuan Chen: Changjiang Water Resources Protection Institute, Wuhan 430051, China

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 17, 1-11

Abstract: China’s water shortage problem is becoming increasingly severe. Improving water use efficiency is crucial to alleviating China’s water crisis. This paper evaluates the water use efficiency of 31 provinces and municipalities in China by using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method. When the usual DEA model has too many indexes selected, it will cause the majority of the decision making units (DMUs) efficiency values be one, which leads to invalid evaluation results. Therefore, by using the entropy weight method, a new synthetic set of indexes is constructed based on the original indexes. The new synthetic set of indexes retains the full information of the original indexes, and the goal of simplifying the number of indexes is achieved. Simultaneously, by empowering the original indexes, the evaluation using synthetic indexes can also avoid the impact of industrial structure and labor division on water use efficiency. The results show that in China’s northeastern grain producing areas, water use efficiency is higher due to the high level of agricultural modernization. The provinces in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River have the lowest water use efficiency due to water pollution and water waste. In general, China’s overall water use efficiency is low, and there is still much room for improvement.

Keywords: DEA; entropy weight method; evaluation indexes; water use efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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