School of Economics and Management, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510006, China.
Department of Economics, Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510632, China; Institute of Resource, Environment and Sustainable Development Research, Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510632, China.
J Environ Manage. 2022 Oct 1;319:115706. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.115706. Epub 2022 Jul 11.
Water rights trading is a market mechanism that promotes the conservation, protection and optimal allocation of water resources. This paper takes the water rights trading pilots' policy as a quasi-natural experiment, and then adopts the spatial difference-in-differences model to investigate the water-saving and wastewater-reducing effects of water rights trading pilots by using the panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2006 to 2019. The results indicate that water rights trading has good environmental governance effects on water-saving and wastewater-reducing in the pilot areas. However, water rights transactions are mainly concentrated within provinces, and there is no spatial spillover effect. Besides, the pilot policy has more long-term dynamic effects in reducing sewage discharge than water-saving due to rebound effect possibly. The optimization of the industrial structure and environmental regulation play important roles in the realization of the policy effects of the water rights trading pilots. An important implication is that water rights trading pilots are worthy of promotion throughout China in view of the policy effects, and China should focus on inter-regional market transactions and industrial structure transformation to promote the optimization of the water rights trading mechanism.
水权交易是一种促进水资源节约、保护和优化配置的市场机制。本文以水权交易试点政策为准自然实验，利用 2006-2019 年中国 30 个省份的面板数据，采用空间双重差分模型，考察了水权交易试点的节水减排效应。结果表明，水权交易对试点地区的节水减排具有良好的环境治理效应。然而，水权交易主要集中在省内，没有空间溢出效应。此外，由于可能存在反弹效应，试点政策在减少污水排放方面的长期动态效应大于节水效应。产业结构优化和环境规制在实现水权交易试点政策效果方面发挥了重要作用。一个重要的启示是，鉴于政策效应，水权交易试点值得在全国范围内推广，中国应注重跨区域市场交易和产业结构转型，以促进水权交易机制的优化。
