About the Webinar
The global transition toward a low-carbon economy is reshaping production networks worldwide. While renewable energy and green technologies are often viewed as environmentally sustainable, their supply chains can require substantial amounts of water for extraction, processing, manufacturing, cooling, and cleaning. As goods move across international borders, the water embedded in their production travels with them in the form of virtual water.
This webinar explores a provocative question at the intersection of environmental economics, international trade, and sustainable development:
Could water abundance generate economic effects similar to the well-known “resource curse” associated with oil, gas, and mineral wealth?
Drawing on the research paper “Global Virtual Water Flows 1and a Water Resource Curse?”, the presentation examines how international trade redistributes green, blue, and grey water resources across countries and investigates whether these virtual water flows influence economic development and growth trajectories.
Abstract
Ecological economists and environmental managers use footprint and input-output tools to trace how production and trade redistribute pressure on freshwater systems. We examine how international supply chains transmit green, blue, and grey virtual water and how these flows relate to countries’ development paths.
Using the Eora multi-region input-output framework, we construct country-year measures of net and gross embodied-water outflows for 189 countries over 2010–2021 and link them to macro metrics from the World Development Indicators. Our empirical strategy is reduced-form: rather than treating trade values as causal drivers of mechanically constructed virtual-water flows, we relate component-specific virtual-water positions to manufacturing structure, trade openness, water-withdrawal capacity, and growth outcomes.
Three results stand out.
Total water withdrawal is positively associated with blue- and grey-water net outflows and with gross outflows of all three components. Manufacturing is most strongly associated with grey-water outflows, consistent with pollution-intensive production. In growth regressions, green- and grey-water outflows are positively associated with GDP growth, unlike blue-water outflows, and we find no generic macro-level water resource curse.
The findings underscore the need to distinguish rainfall-based, withdrawal-based, and pollution-related water pressures when interpreting embodied-water trade. These results also point towards practical levers in ecological economics: efficiency gains, cleaner production, structural upgrading, and diversified sourcing.
Time
18 June 2026 (Thursday)
10:00–11:00 AM
Zoom Meeting
Online via Zoom
Meeting ID: 884 4266 5989
Passcode: 912321
Speaker
Jiajing Sun
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Jiajing Sun serves as Deputy Head of the Department of Statistics and Data Science and Deputy Director of the Teaching and Research Office at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
She is a CFA Charterholder, Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (FIMA), and Member of the London Mathematical Society (LMS). She earned her Ph.D. in Management from the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom.
Her research spans econometrics, time series analysis, nonparametric statistics, financial econometrics, environmental economics, energy economics, and sustainable development. Her work has been published in leading international journals including Journal of Econometrics, Economics Letters, Ecological Economics, Journal of Environmental Management, Journal of Multivariate Analysis, and Energy Economics.
She has led projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and contributed to research on financial regulation, financial technology, the digital economy, and sustainable development policy.
Discussant
Kun Guo
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Kun Guo is a leading scholar in the fields of energy finance, climate finance, and complexity science.
She currently serves as Secretary-General of the China Energy Finance Professional Committee of the International Society for Energy Transition Studies (ISETS), and Deputy Director and Secretary-General of the Finance Committee of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the China Democratic National Construction Association.
Professor Guo is Associate Editor of both the International Review of Financial Analysis and the Journal of Climate Finance. She has led numerous national and industry-sponsored research projects, published more than 80 academic papers, and authored influential books and teaching materials including Energy Finance and Climate Risk Management.
Her policy recommendations have been adopted by multiple government agencies and institutions.
Why Join?
This webinar brings together perspectives from environmental economics, sustainable development, international trade, and energy transition research to examine one of the most overlooked dimensions of globalization: the movement of water through global supply chains.
Researchers, students, policymakers, and practitioners interested in sustainability, energy systems, environmental management, and international economics are warmly invited to attend.
18 June 2026 | 10:00–11:00 AM
Online via Zoom