Measuring the Performance of Wastewater Treatment in China

When a developing country is undergoing a rapid growth period, agricultural wastewater, domestic wastewater, industrial wastewater, and organic matter content in chemical oxygen demand (COD) usually increase in great amounts, causing environmental pollution. Thus, this paper proposes a summary of factors to assess the performance of wastewater discharge costs. Total fixed assets, population growth, and wastewater treatment expenses in various regions of China were used as input factors, while gross regional product, discharged wastewater, and discharged COD were used as output factors. We employed the directional distance function (DDF) method to compare 31 regions of China between 2011 and 2015. The results showed that areas with leading economic development and areas with a small population and vast natural land have good wastewater treatment efficiency. In the past five years, economic development and wastewater treatment expense efficiency in Chongqing have been improving, such that by the end of 2015, this region efficiency was approaching frontier efficiency. We also found that the efficiency of wastewater treatment expense in many areas often falls below 0.6, which is still very low. There is, thus, a large gap between the regions and the leading frontier regions, meaning that the efficiency of wastewater treatment expense needs to be improved.