Trade heterogeneity and virtual water exports of China

Abstract

China is facing serious water scarcity, and the effects of international trade on its water resources have been widely examined. Processing exports account for nearly half of China’s gross exports. Adopting China’s multi-regional input–output table that captures processing exports, we enrich the literature on virtual water exports by accounting for trade heterogeneity. The results show that China’s virtual water exports show a significant trade heterogeneity. Normal and processing exports are attributed to 86.7% and 13.3% of the Agriculture sector’s water use induced by exports respectively. Conversely, normal and processing exports are attributed to 31.8% and 68.3% of the Communications Equipment, Computers sector’s water use induced by exports respectively. In addition, a cross-regional compensation is needed to deal with the unequal regional distribution of water uses and economic benefits related to exports.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual water
• processing exports
• normal exports
• input–output analysis

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous referees and editors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The data are obtained from the National Economic and Social Development Statistics Bulletin for 2012. http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/tjgb/ndtjgb/qgndtjgb/201302/t20130221_30027.html.

2 Source: http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/2013/indexch.htm.

3 The data are obtained from the National Economic and Social Development Statistics Bulletin for 2012. http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/tjgb/ndtjgb/qgndtjgb/201302/t20130221_30027.html.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Funds for International Cooperation and Exchange of the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 51861125101], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 71974141, 71834004, 71673198, 72173130], the National Key Research and Development Program of China [grant No. 2017YFC0404600].