How to Price Ecosystem Water Yield Service and Determine the Amount of Compensation?—The Wei River Basin in China as an Example

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is interesting and it presents a good contribution  to the body of knowledge. Nevertheless, it needs to be improved further.

Main remarks:

Introduction-Please consider adding more references at international level regarding ecosystem services.

L50-65-Add more references regarding the approaches mentioned.

The objectives and the structure is well presented.

2. Materials and Methods-I suggest firtstly present the tehoretical approach and then the study area. This method may be implemented in other areas

3. Results-Well presented and consistent.

General it is quite well presented and present rellevant data for the body of knowledge.

 

Author Response

Thank you very much for your constructive and thoughtful comments. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper makes an intuitive discussion of the problem is the authors identify several gaps in the methodologies used to calculate the ecological compensation. Facing those gaps the paper brings important contributions related to the idea of considering the output method and both, the supply and demand of water yield service. I even highlight the following issues: the propose of a theoretical model of pricing and compensation for achieving the balance between supply and demand of water yield service; and the use of a panel threshold econometric model to estimate the production elasticity of water for pricing.

About the study area, the author should also describe more about the current water management and water pricing policies.

The econometric model proposed is interesting and is aligned with the objectives, but, in the results (section 3.1.) I do not understand why the authors tested model 1 and model 2, since in the methodology they only present model 3. If this is the option, please make a mention to the use of these both models in the section of methodology.

In line 254 of page 8, it is referred that the in model 2 “…term of water (logarithm) were 0.194 and -0.259..” I think the authors want to say 4.968 and -0.259.

In page 9, the authors refer that in model 3, the water (logarithm) estimated coefficient value was 0.493 for a water (logarithm) value below than 9.44 and for higher values was 0.454, concluding that the increase of water continue promoting the regional economic development, but at a relatively slow down speed. This seems me too exaggerated as 0.493 is not much different from 0.454.

The authors should promote a better linkage between section 3.1 and 3.2. Even the way as the results of model 3 are used to compute equation (7) is not clear and needs to be better explained.

 

Finally, in section 3.3, why the author perform a new cluster analysis and they do not used the results of the previous cluster analysis done in section 3.2. since it was the base to calculate the water prices 

Author Response

Thank you very much for your constructive and thoughtful comments. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc