Spatiotemporal Variability and Impact Factors of Domestic Water Prices in China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The introduction is short. References focus almost exclusively on China’s case and the theoretical framework around water tariffs needs to be further developed. For example, can the water supply service make a profit in China? In several countries it is not possible by regulation and any profit must be reinvested in improving the service. Thus, if profit is not possible, tariffs are mainly driven by cost recovery and water accessibility. Therefore, although the data and methodology seem to be correct, the lack of information on the costs of the service is a major shortcoming.

The results section spends too much time describing the recent evolution of water prices in China and the spatial analysis yields results that are common in the literature. This section would be of much greater value if the results obtained were compared with those of other works, both in China itself and in other countries.

The discussion is a section with major shortcomings. No discussion is generated other than that related to tariff policy and no value is placed on spatial statistical analysis. Moreover, it does not contain a single quotation. Thus, it is impossible to assess both this section and the results section, as the reader is completely unaware of the situation in other cases.

The conclusions drawn are common in the literature.

There are two ways to increase the value of the article, to reinforce the importance of the spatial methodology and to make a more developed tariff policy proposal, to which should be added an improvement of the theoretical framework and the use of more references, mainly international, thus improving the fit of the results and the discussion in the literature.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review of “Spatiotemporal variability and impact factors of domestic water process in China” by Xie et al.

 

Major comments: This is generally well-written and interesting paper on the price of water in China that assesses spatiotemporal variability over a period of 13 years. The science and mathematics of the analysis appear to be sound.

 

However, how to assess the data presented is most difficult within the constraints of governance in China. In most governed regions of the world, water prices are subject to free market economic factors outside of the strictly supply and demand balance. The observed spatiotemporal heterogeneity observed by the authors could be linked directly to government subsidies and not classical economic factors as suggested by the authors. It would be useful to the readers of the paper for the authors to create a map of China showing the subsidies at the various cities used in the analysis. Perhaps these data could be used within the analysis to ascertain if the subsidies impact the conclusions of the study concerning the impacts of regional economic conditions of consumers on the rates.

 

I believe that this type of analysis and discussion is very important in confirming the conclusions of the paper. The implementation of a tiered water rate system would only be useful if the rates were set without the influence of government subsidies.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

There are a few sentences that need rewording to avoid English issues.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript is very-well written.

Introduction and materials and methods are satisfactory.

Although the regional, prefecture and economic dependence of China's urban water prices is different from other countries, but the  mentioned drivers are not very much different. Therefore, the results and conclusion may be not much different and could be applicable.or at least good clues for the researchers. 

The references must be typed uniformly.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors,

Thank you very much for the modifications, the article has been considerably improved.

I think there is one brief change that could be very useful for the article. Spatial analyses are not common due to the scarcity of data, so the discussion (and perhaps the conclusions) could further highlight the future usefulness of this methodology.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf