The Water-Economy Nexus and Sustainable Transition of the Pearl River Delta, China (1999–2015)

Lei Liu, Tong Wu, Zhihang Xu and Xiaofeng Pan
Additional contact information
Lei Liu: School of Public Administration, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China
Tong Wu: School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA
Zhihang Xu: School of Public Administration, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China
Xiaofeng Pan: Shenzhen Environmental Monitoring Center, Shenzhen 518049, China

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 8, 1-15

Abstract: As the world’s largest urban area in both size and population, the rapid development of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) during past three decades has been accompanied by worsening water problems. This paper examines the water-economy nexus of the PRD from the perspectives of both water use and water quality between 1999 and 2015, with a Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index decomposition model as well as an Environmental Kuznets Curve model, in order to assess the sustainable transition of the area. The results show that in this period, while the water dependency of economic development went down by a significant extent, the efficiency gains did not prevail over problems caused by economic scale expansion. However, at the city level, the 2008 financial crisis stimulated an economic transformation of the main economies from being scale-dominated to being efficiency-dominated. From 2009 to 2015, the sewage decreases driven by water dependency of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Dongguan outweighed the sewage increases driven by economic scale. While sewage discharge increased, the river water quality of the PRD kept improving. We found an inverted “U”-shaped relationship between GDP per capita and water quality of the PRD, with GDP per capita = ¥14,228.27 as the inflection point for river water quality. Once dubbed the “factory floor” of the world, the PRD has moved into a less environmentally impactful phase of development, with more expenditure on environmental protection and policy reform. However, given the huge and ever-increasing economic and population scales, ensuring a sufficient and safe water supply through industrial recycling and public education, along with even further pollution abatement, will be particularly important.

Keywords: Pearl River Delta; sustainable urbanization; LMDI; water-economy nexus; water policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/8/2595/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/8/2595/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:8:p:2595-:d:159655

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().