Abstract

REVOLLO-FERNANDEZ, Daniel A.; RODRIGUEZ-TAPIA, Lilia  and  MORALES-NOVELO, Jorge A.. Economic Value of the Water in the Manufacturing Industry in the San Juan River hydrological sub-region, Mexico. Tecnol. cienc. agua [online]. 2018, vol.9, n.5, pp.218-245.  Epub Nov 24, 2020. ISSN 2007-2422.  https://doi.org/10.24850/j-tyca-2018-05-09.

Water is one of the largest consumables in the production process, especially in the manufacturing industry, but at the same time, this resource may pose scarcity problems mainly due to the lack of knowledge about its value. In most emerging countries, the monetary value of the water used in the production process does not necessarily reflect its scarcity, or the catchment and treatment costs, thus the cost of water is not properly charged. This work aims to calculate the economic value of water in the manufacturing industry in the San Juan River hydrological subregion (HSRSJ), a river basin with scarcity issues and with a high socio-economic importance It bases its analysis on the concept of elasticity in production with respect to consumable water (ε W ) and the value of the marginal product (ρ W ). To do so, we used information related to roughly 18 000 economic units surveyed in 2013, and two types of production functions: Cobb-Douglas and Trans-Logarithmic. We estimated that ε W and ρ W were equal to 0.046 and USD 13.0/m3 respectively. The ρ W ranged between USD 0.9/m3 for the computer equipment industry to USD 15.4/m3 for the chemicals industry, which indicates that ρ W varied according to the industry. The results have important implications for different areas of industrial water management, especially in river basins or water regions where the resource poses scarcity issues and at the same time those are regions of high socio-economic importance.

Keywords : Economic value; water; manufacturing industry; scarcity.