A paper on Jinan spring water

Jinan is famous for its numerous springs and is called "Spring City". In Liu E's Travels of Lao Can in Qing Dynasty, there is a description of "Every family hangs the sun in spring". Spring water is closely related to the urban development of Jinan. While making historic contributions, it also gave birth to many cultural celebrities such as Li Qingzhao and Xin Qiji. Spring is the soul of Jinan.

However, since the 1980s, the spring water has risen and stopped, and the cut-off period has been shortened, and the cut-off duration has gradually increased, with the longest cut-off time reaching 926 days. Jinan Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government attached great importance to it, and all functional departments took active actions, and experts from all sides made suggestions and took emergency measures mainly by administrative orders? Recharge the source, close the self-provided wells in the urban area, and increase the amount of water diverted from the Yellow River. , and achieved certain results. But in the long run, in order to realize the long-term gushing of Jinan spring water, effective institutional arrangements must be made for spring water protection. The following uses economic methods to analyze and arrange the system of spring protection.

1. Analysis on the Genesis and Cut-off of Jinan Spring

1. Genesis of Jinan Spring

Jinan spring water is formed by the special geological conditions in Jinan. Jinan is high in the south and low in the north, and the spring water comes from the southern mountainous area. From the northern foot of Mount Tai in the south to the urban area in the north, it becomes a piedmont inclined plain and a Yellow River alluvial plain, with a height difference of more than 500 m from north to south, so that surface water and groundwater are collected in the urban area. After the rainfall seeps into the ground, it flows northward along the direction of the rock stratum until the urban area is blocked by igneous rocks invading the rock mass, and a large amount of groundwater collects, and the water body rises under pressure, and the confined water emerges from the surface, gushing out of the ground at the karst fissure, forming spring water. Therefore, the gushing of spring water must be based on a certain groundwater level, that is, there must be enough water resources in the spring area to maintain a certain groundwater level. According to the test, the critical groundwater level of Baotu Spring is 26.98m. Only when the groundwater level reaches this level, Baotu Spring will gush out.

2. The main reason why the spring water is cut off.

First, the upstream soil erosion reduces the ability of water conservation.

The spring area in the southern mountainous area of Jinan City is about 1500 square kilometers, of which the key recharge area is nearly 200 square kilometers. The recharge of spring water is affected by atmospheric precipitation, effective water storage capacity of underlying soil, permeability and other factors. In recent years, the destruction of forest vegetation in the spring recharge area in southern Jinan has obviously weakened the ability of the spring recharge area to intercept atmospheric precipitation and conserve water. Various development and construction activities in the region are becoming more and more frequent, especially the increase of the hardened impervious area of the ground, which reduces the infiltration capacity of rainwater, and the rainwater forms a large amount of surface runoff loss, and the groundwater cannot be effectively replenished.

Second, over-exploitation of groundwater downstream. With the expansion of population and city scale in Jinan.

The water demand in Jinan has greatly increased. For this problem, some water supply departments and water use departments are unwilling to use surface water and Yellow River passenger water, but prefer to use spring groundwater to solve it. There are two reasons: First, Jinan's groundwater quality is excellent, the treatment cost is low, and it has economic benefits as a single enterprise. Second, influenced by the traditional idea of water control formed over the years, it is considered that as long as the ability to develop water resources can be increased and the recent economic and social development can be met, it is a political achievement. Especially in the process of water use in Jinan, the water use efficiency is low? Water waste and water shortage coexist, and there is still great potential for water conservation.

"There are losses on the top and over-exploitation on the bottom", which makes Jinan Qunquan lose its former style. In fact, to solve this problem, we only need to start from two aspects: one is to restore the water conservation capacity of the spring water supply area in southern Jinan. The second is to control the exploitation of groundwater in the spring area in a planned way and improve the utilization efficiency of water resources. Therefore, it is necessary to arrange an efficient system to ensure the development of these two aspects.

Second, the systematic analysis of spring water protection.

Institutional economics holds that institutions are closely related to the development of human society. Regular institutional arrangements make the chaotic relationship between people orderly. A good system will bring high efficiency.

The institutional arrangement of a certain kind of article can start with the analysis of its attributes. The attributes of each commodity are different, and the effective supply of commodities with different attributes will be affected by human rationality and self-interest. According to the article attribute theory, exclusiveness and competitiveness are two criteria for classifying articles. Exclusivity means that the consumption of goods is exclusive, that is, others can be excluded from using the goods at a lower cost; Competitiveness means that one person's use of an article will affect the quality of others' use of this article. According to the judgment, we can get a result of four groups of classification: pure private goods (exclusive and competitive), club goods (exclusive and non-competitive), public pond resources (non-exclusive and competitive) and pure public goods (non-exclusive and non-competitive).

Pure personal items such as refrigerators and color TVs can effectively guide their production, exchange, distribution and consumption according to Coase theorem. Articles that are not competitive and can be used by others at low cost, such as water pipes and gas pipes, have the status of natural monopoly and are easy to cause efficiency losses caused by monopoly. Non-exclusive goods, such as national defense, public grassland resources, etc., cannot be used by others when consuming, that is, the property rights cannot be clearly defined. For this kind of goods, rational and self-interested individuals will not be willing to provide them, and everyone has a tendency to hitchhike. In other words, in addition to purely private goods, the effective supply of several other goods requires more complicated institutional arrangements.

According to two criteria for judging the properties of articles? Spring water is a kind of pure public goods with the characteristics of non-exclusiveness and non-competition. Spring, a public commodity, has externalities. As long as spring exists, everyone in Jinan can enjoy its social and ecological benefits. At the same time, many ecological and social benefits of spring will automatically "overflow" to the society, which is a typical external positive effect. However, the over-exploitation of spring water resources will destroy the ecological environment and have obvious external negative effects. Fundamentally speaking, the destruction of the environment will also damage the income of every resident in Jinan. The existence of external positive effects means that the marginal income of producers who provide spring water protection services is less than that of society, which leads to the lack of sufficient enthusiasm of producers to carry out such activities. That is to say, from an economic point of view, as an independent investor, no private investor is willing to invest in activities to protect springs, because there is little or no income. The existence of spring externalities makes spring users? Spring users can get more benefits without paying the necessary price. Because the use of underground spring water resources does not need to pay a high price, public water supply enterprises, enterprises and institutions that use underground spring water in Jinan spring area tend to use underground spring water resources instead of high-cost surface water and Yellow River passenger water, which leads to excessive use of underground spring water resources.

From the above analysis, it can be seen that the protection of Jinan spring water can not solve the problem permanently only by emergency engineering measures and administrative measures taken in a certain period of time. The government cannot and should not provide sufficient funds for continuous investment, but must make reasonable institutional arrangements for spring water protection.