To alleviate increasingly serious water pollution and shortages in developing countries, various kinds of policies have been implemented by local governments. It is vital to quantify and evaluate the performance and potential economic impacts of these policies. This study develops a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model to simulate the regional economic and environmental effects of discharge fees. Firstly, water resources and water environment factors are separated from the input and output sources of the National Economic Production Department. Secondly, an extended Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) of Jiangsu province is developed to simulate various scenarios. By changing values of the discharge fees (increased by 50%, 100% and 150%), three scenarios are simulated to examine their influence on the overall economy and each industry. The simulation results show that an increased fee will have a negative impact on Gross Domestic Product (GDP). However, waste water may be effectively controlled. Also, this study demonstrates that along with the economic costs, the increase of the discharge fee will lead to the upgrading of industrial structures from a situation of heavy pollution to one of light pollution which is beneficial to the sustainable development of the economy and the protection of the environment.

In this paper, a multi-dimensional equilibrium allocation model of water resources was developed based on the groundwater multiple loop iteration technique. The proposed model is an integrated framework of three modules respectively corresponding to the input layer, operation layer, and feedback layer in the allocation process. Firstly, a prediction model integrating the genetic algorithm-back propagation (GA-BP) model, the general regression neural network (GRNN) model, and the support vector machine (SVM) model was built to predict the future reservoir runoff, and the results were entered into the database of an optimal allocation model. Furthermore, taking exploitable groundwater as the feedback factor, the water resource optimal allocation model was continuously optimized. Also, the groundwater multiple loop iteration technique was applied to the feedback process. The proposed model was successfully applied to a typical region in Jinan, Eastern China. The uncertainties of future reservoir runoff and exploitable groundwater were taken into account. The results revealed that groundwater represented 36.6% of water supply in the base year, indicating that it is the main water source in Jinan. However, the amount of groundwater mining was decreased after considering the exploitable groundwater. The developed framework provides a comprehensive approach towards optimal future allocation of water resources, especially for the regions with overexploited groundwater.

With the implementation of China’s “Going Out” strategy and “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) as well as the shortage of domestic hydropower market, the scale of hydropower investment along BRI by Chinese companies has expanded rapidly. However, these countries have great differences in politics, laws, economy, hydropower potential, social development and environmental constraints. Due to the inappropriate choice of countries for investment, many failure cases have also occurred. To specifically evaluate hydropower investment in these countries, this paper proposed a six-dimensional indicator system which can represents the characteristics of hydropower investment along BRI based on the analysis of the typical cases of overseas investment by Chinese enterprises. Furthermore, a fuzzy optimal model based on the Delphi-Entropy weight was constructed to evaluate the hydropower investment of 65 countries along BRI as well as a list of countries and corresponding investment grades are proposed. The result indicates that politics and hydropower industry factors are the key determinants of choosing the countries for conducting investment while legal, economic, social and environmental factors should also be covered. In conclusion, the optimal choices for China’s hydropower investment along BRI are Russia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and Indonesia and the strategy has been given accordingly. Moreover the policy recommendations from the perspective of nation and enterprise level have also been proposed.

Electric power market transaction is one of the important measures for the reform of the electric power system in China. In this paper, the optimal operation model of the reservoir was established. Based on the standard particle swarm optimization, the improved particle swarm optimization algorithm was proposed. Taking a hydropower station as an example, the Time of Use (TOU) price annual profits calculated in dry years, flat and humid years than the single price increased by 1.42%, 19.49% and 15.85%. The results show that the annual benefit price of hydropower station was significantly higher than the annual benefit of one price system when taking TOU price into account, can be used to solve the reservoir optimal scheduling strategy in the electricity market transaction model.