The Water Market Development And Administration In China

Water is kind of scarce and crucial resource for the survival and development of human beings. The characteristics of non-exclusiveness and non-competition of water, mattering in terms of national and civil wealth, have resulted in disorder of exploitation, waste and abuse in the usage and water pollution because of its nature of quasi-public goods. With the growth of population, speeding up of urbanization, enhancement of industrialization, the contradiction between water supply and demand has become more and more striking. Particularly, over-consumption and inefficient uses have worsened situation further. Water scarcity and degraded water quality have posed great threat to the sustainable development of water resources and health of water environment. How to achieve rational utilization of water resources, arrive at efficiency and guarantee equity have been hot topics of economists and decision- makers.In perspective of modern property rights economics, the most effective solution to solve water scarcity is to treat water resources as a kind of commercial goods and allow the tradeoff of use rights so that real relationship between supply and demand can be vividly mirrored. A perfect water rights transfer markets should be established to fulfill the mission of quantifying demand by supply.Basing on overseas water rights experiences and practice, the paper explores how to set up water affair markets, supervision and administration of government into water markets taking into consideration of Chinese context.