Benchmarking on Water Resource Utilization Efficiency of Prefecture-Level Cities in Jiangxi, China: A Bootstrap-DEA Approach with Three-Stage DEA Models

China has long been adopted traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) models to measure water resources utilization efficiency of different provinces and cities without bias correction of efficiency scores. In this study, the Bootstrap-DEA approach embedded 3-stage DEA models was introduced to analyze the comprehensive efficiency of water resources utilization in the different prefecture-level cities Jiangxi and tried to improve the application of this method for benchmarking and inter-regional research. It is found that the bias corrected efficiency scores of Bootstrap-DEA differ significantly from those of the traditional DEA model, which implies that Chinese researchers need to update their DEA models for more scientific calculation of water resources utilization efficiency scores. This research has helped narrow the inter-regional gap in the comprehensive efficiency measurement and improvement of water resources utilization. It is suggested that Bootstrap-DEA embedded 3-stage DEA models be widely applied into afterward research to measure comprehensive efficiency of water resources utilization in regional inter-city so as to better serve for efficiency improvement and related decision making.