Dynamic analysis of residential and enterprise water supply and leakage efficiencies

With per capita water resources at only around a quarter of the world average, China's water resources are limited and unevenly distributed. Past research on water resource utilization has mainly focused on industrial water use (agriculture and industry), water plant ownership efficiencies (private or public operation), or water resources and economic production; however, there have been few studies focused on water supply livelihood. Therefore, this paper considered both industrial production water services, non-production water services (public sector and residential water use), and water leakage losses, which is a water supply problem seldom mentioned in other studies. An undesirable directional distance function (DDF) dynamic data envelopment analysis (DEA) model was employed for the dynamic analysis as it was able to deal with both desirable and undesirable outputs at the same time. The model examined collected water supply and water leak efficiency data from 30 Chinese provinces/municipalities from 2007 to 2018, from which it was found that (1) Beijing, Gansu, Guangdong, and Ningxia had efficient water supply and water leak losses from 2007 to 2018 and the most improved province was Jiangxi; (2) the eastern provinces, in general, had better water efficiencies and the central and western provinces needed greater improvements; and (3) the lowest water leakage loss efficiencies were in Inner Mongolia, Jiangxi, and Heilongjiang, all of which required significant improvements.