Integrated basin management: Water and food policy options for Turkey

This paper presents a basin scale analysis of the Nilüfer River Basin of Turkey, where agricultural, urban, and environmental users compete for scarce water in an environment where climate change and food security present large and growing challenges. It presents results of a basin scale dynamic nonlinear programming model that addresses economic efficiency, climate change, and food security. Its approach can be applied to other water-stressed regions operating in environments of economic and hydrologic constraints on water use. Basin scale modeling approach provides a general framework for formulating water management policies, consistent with the principles underlying the European Union Water Framework Directive.     

Basin impacts of irrigation water conservation policy

Climate change, uncertain future water supplies, growing population, and increased water demands continue to raise the importance of finding cost-effective water conservation measures. Irrigated agriculture is the world's largest water user, so governments, donor organizations, water suppliers, and farmers continue to look for measures that would produce more crop per drop. Despite the importance of promoting water conservation in agriculture, little work has been done that integrates hydrologic, economic, institutional, and policy dimensions of water conservation. This paper presents an integrated basin scale analysis of water conservation subsidies for irrigated agriculture. A dynamic, nonlinear programming model is developed and applied for the Upper Rio Grande Basin of Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, USA. Several potential public subsidies of drip irrigation are analyzed for their economic and hydrologic impacts at both the farm and basin levels. Results indicate that water conservation subsidies for drip irrigation produce several effects. These include greater on-farm implementation of water-conserving technology, less water applied to crops, more water consumed by crops, increased farm income, greater crop production, more land irrigated, and increased total water-related economic benefits for the basin. Findings provide a framework for designing and implementing water conservation policies for irrigated agriculture.     

Sustainable development of Shandong peninsula Peninsula urban agglomeration: a scenario analysis based on water shortage and water environment changes

China has experienced a rapid urbanization since late 1970s. The great increase of urban population has resulted in various environmental changes, of which urban water shortage and water environment problems have occurred in most cities, especially in the rapidly developing urban agglomerations in the eastern coastal region. This research, taking Shandong Peninsula Urban Agglomeration (SPUA) as a case study area, analyzes the urbanization expansion in the last decades, discusses the water shortage and water environment changes following the rapid economic development and urbanization such as groundwater sinking in the urban and plain area, sea water and salt-water intrusion in the coastal cities, water pollution overspreading and "water ecosystem degradation, and puts forwards some strategies for sustainability in populous regions with severe water shortage. Some countermeasures for sustainable development of SPUA are put forward, such as modern water resources inter-city networks to regulate water resource between cities, adjusting urbanization policy and urban scale planning to promote the development of small towns and medium sized cities, optimizing urban industry structure by restricting high water consumption enterprises and stimulating the growth of tertiary industry, improving water use efficient to reduce freshwater consumption and wastewater discharge, introducing economic means to water pricing and water management system. and restoring ecological conditions to strengthen the natural water-making capacity.     

Efficiency and Equity in Natural Resources Pricing: A Proposal for Urban Water Distribution Service

This paper focuses on the design of optimal prices for urban water distribution service. In this context, pricing should be aimed at achieving efficiency, equity, financial aspects, and/or public acceptability and transparency. The proposed tariffs are based on the theoretical frameworks suggested by Ramsey (1927) and Feldstein (1972). As a prior step, estimations of urban water demands and water costs are carried out for the Spanish municipality of Seville. Finally, an empirical comparison, in welfare terms, is conducted between the proposed tariffs and those applicable in the year 2000.     

Equity, Efficiency and Financial Viability: Public-Utility Pricing with Special Reference to Water Supply

The pricing and investment policies of a public enterprise should be designed to achieve efficiency since equity is better pursued by general policy regarding income distribution. Short-run marginal-cost pricing does not generally lead to long-term deficit, but may involve price and surplus/deficit cycles for the case with lumpy investments and growing demand, where the price increases with demand but is reduced with capacity expansion. Taking account of the extra costs of government revenue collection and the likely average price/cost ratio in the economy, the third-best pricing policy is likely to result in long-term surplus, making the objectives of equity, efficiency and financial viability much more consistent with each other than is generally believed. This is particularly true for water with historically increasing costs of additional sources of supply.     

The Meaning of Social Efficiency

Abstract

Policy implementation calls for efficiency. But because policy concerns range over broad social and political-economic areas, the efficient pursuit of one particular goal may conflict with the realization of some other, equally important social interest. Hence, efficiency for its own sake cannot be a policy goal. Giving special attention to the development process, the paper discusses the problems and contradictions that arise when policymakers working in a framework of neoclassical economic theory attempt to deal with issues of equity, stabilization, markets and trade. Starting with the limitations of market efficiency when conventional requirements of social welfare as well as social and environmental sustainability are taken into account, it is argued that a more meaningful concept of social efficiency can be obtained with the help of the human development indicators elaborated by the United Nations Development Program, augmented by the sustainability indicators developed by the European Union and others during the last decade.     

Water accounting for the Orange River Basin: An economic perspective on managing a transboundary resource

The framework for water accounting is applied to an international river basin, the Orange River Basin, which is shared among Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho and South Africa. Each of the riparian states faces water constraints and relies increasingly on shared international water resources. The countries have adopted the principle of an economic approach to water management, once basin human needs are met, and all but Lesotho have constructed national water accounts to assist in water management. The water accounts for the Orange River Basin bring an economic perspective to water management at the regional level. The accounts include supply and use tables, which are used to compare the contribution to water supply from each riparian state to the amount used. The water accounts are then linked to economic data for each country to calculate water use and productivity by industry and country. There are considerable disparities in water productivity among the countries, which should be taken into account in future decisions about water allocation, pricing and infrastructure development.     

Interest rate,size and book-to-market effects in Australian financial firms

The Fama–French three-factor model (1993) has been extensively used to study the pricing of nonfinancial stocks. This study provides the first examination of the pricing of Australian financial stocks using the Fama–French framework. The four-factor model (market, size, book-to-market and momentum) augmented with the level, slope and curvature of the interest rate term structure is used to examine the pricing of Australian financial stocks. The interest rate factors have not been previously considered for pricing Australian stocks within the Fama–French framework. Consistent with US evidence, we use a system-based estimation to show that the size and book-to-market factors are not priced in the cross section of the equity returns of Australian financial stocks. Momentum and term spread are priced in the equity returns of both financial and nonfinancial stocks. These findings are robust to the inclusion of control variables such as default spread, the inflation rate and a dummy variable for the global financial crisis.     

教育可持续发展的经济学分析:一个基本框架

教育不仅是一个社会学范畴,同时也是一个重要的经济学范畴.在考察教育的经济学内涵的基础上,引入经济学的公平与效率、供给与需求、规模与结构、竞争与垄断、成本与收益等概念等作为分析工具,可构建一个教育可持续发展的经济学分析框架,能为我国教育的可持续发展提供理论借鉴.     

投资规模、投资效率与经济增长的动态关系研究

投资规模扩大和投资效率提高是推动经济增长的重要动力。通过向量自回归模型实证检验中国投资增长、投资效率与经济增长的动态关系,发现投资增长和投资效率提高均能促进中国经济增长,但中国经济发展长期高度依赖投资规模的扩张,投资效率没有得到相应提高,经济增长的可持续性正面临挑战。为实现可持续发展,中国经济需要转变发展方式,实现投资规模驱动型增长方式向投资效率提高驱动型增长方式的转变。     

Desperately Seeking θ's: Estimating the Distribution of Consumers Under Increasing Block Rates

This paper shows that increasing block rate pricing schedules usually applied by water utilities can reduce the efficiency and equity levels. To do this, we first present a two step method to estimate the demand and to recover the distribution of consumer tastes when increasing block rate pricing is used. We show that in this case the tariff induces a pooling equilibrium and customers with different taste parameters will be observed to choose the same consumption level. Second, we show that a two-part tariff that neither reduces the revenue for the firm nor increases the aggregate level of water consumption increases the welfare and equity levels in relation to an increasing block rates schedule.     

基于可持续发展的城市综合评价体系实证研究--以西安市为例

随着中国经济的快速发展,城市化步伐呈现加快的趋势,但城市规模的盲目扩大产生了高昂的生态成本.针对目前中国城市的发展现状,本文提出城市可持续发展模式,构建了包含经济、社会、人口、资源和环境的城市可持续发展综合评价指标体系.并以西安市为案例,系统测度了西安市的可持续发展能力.实证结果表明,西安市呈弱可持续发展状态,尤其是人口、环境和资源体系问题严峻.对城市可持续发展的定量评估将为政府监测城市的可持续发展、制定城市发展规划提供理论依据,这对我国目前的城市化发展具有一定的指导意义.     

An Incentive Water Pricing Policy for Sustainable Water Use

By adopting the Water Framework Directive (WFD), the European Commission (EC) and the European Council made recommendations for water pricing policies in European Union (EU) member states with a view to enhancing the sustainability of water resources. Clearly, the directive integrates economic instruments in environmental policies to provide incentives for the sustainable use of water resources. Our analysis will focus on public water utilities, required to be financially self-sufficient, facing demand and capacity shocks. The paper deals with the simultaneous determination of incentive pricing policies and investment rules under an ex~ante maximum demand charge. We will characterize the welfare-optimal capacity selection rule and the welfare-optimal maximum demand pricing rule. Heterogeneous consumers demands are considered when tariffs are set ex~ante, before demands are known. Our results are state-contingent nonlinear pricing that responds to demand fluctuations and capacity constraints.      

日本对水资源的精细化管理及利用

随着经济的发展、人口的增长以及城镇化的推进和都市不断的大型化,水资源的管理面临严峻的挑战．尤其在公众环保意识和环保要求较高的情况下,工业废水的回收和处理技术、农业节水技术以及家庭节水与净水技术等要求也越来越高。未来对水资源的利用必然是一个节约、环保、安全、便捷、可循环和可持续利用的模式。通过研究日本在水资源利用、精细化管理以及水利用相关技术研发方面的做法,期望为我国节能城市等的建设提供有益参考     

Toward a Horizonal Theory of Justice: Efficiency,Equity, Rights and Capabilities in a Free Market Economy

The theory of planning horizons and their relation to pricing, conscience and learning has been explored in some detail in terms of efficiency attributes and ecological health (Jennings 2003, Journal of Economic Issues 39:365-373, 2005, 2007a, b, 2008a). This paper addresses the equity implications of planning horizons in terms of the social role and importance of justice, rights and capabilities in a free market economy. From my earlier work, cooperation—not competition—is seen as the means to longer and broader horizons in an efficiency frame, mitigating any alleged tradeoff against equity issues. The impact of longer horizons on fairness and justice in terms of intentions and outcomes along with rights and capabilities still remains unexplored. This paper reviews the normative aspects of planning horizons, showing how ethical and ecological conscience spreads with horizon effects, strengthening goals of fairness and the internalization of social effects. In this setting, capabilities and empowerment are enhanced by respect for human rights, as social conscience spreads through interhorizonal complementarities. The features of a long-horizon world differ from myopic contexts, specifically in the relation of efficiency to other goals. This paper examines that difference in terms of its equity aspects, with regard to social justice and the role of rights and capabilities in economic cultures.     

An economic-ecological model of urban growth and urban externalities: empirical evidence from Italy

The importance of urban size for urban sustainability is well known; it plays an important role in the possibility of shaping the quality of urban living conditions. For this reason, it is important to study urban dynamics in connection with the issue of environmental quality. Moreover, awareness of the existence of cyclical patterns in urban dynamics, which we stress in this paper, can be useful for the formulation of environmental policies enabling a steady state equilibrium to be reached in terms of sustainability by flattening out the cyclical waves. A number of more quantitative models for the interpretation of urban growth has been provided; these models are related to the well-known ecological prey-predator model of Lotka–Volterra, and provide a good interpretative framework of the territorial phenomena, characterised by strong feed-back mechanisms. Recently, a pure economic model, linking the per-capita income and the urban rents has been suggested as a possible interpretative model of urban growth which is characterised by two main advantages: (a) its capacity to overcome some of the limits of the previous prey-predator models, like the necessity to apply the concept of an urban carrying capacity; (b) its pure economic feature. The present paper presents the model and the logic behind it and provides an empirical analysis of the model based on the Italian case. An econometric model is presented on the relationship between urban population growth and urban rent, based on a database of 95 Italian cities in time series from 1963 to 1996; the feedback mechanisms between the two variables emerge. This work represents the first attempt to provide an estimate of the prey-predator model based on real data.     

Water markets and freshwater ecosystem services: Policy reform and implementation in the Columbia and Murray-Darling Basins

Water markets have featured prominently in the reallocation of water rights to restore freshwater ecosystem health. Incentive-based water rights acquisition and transactions have emerged as a market-oriented policy approach to reallocate water resources from existing uses to enhance the provision, regulation, and sustainability of freshwater ecosystem services. This paper develops a conceptual framework to examine factors enabling and constraining successful policy reform and implementation in market-based environmental water allocation. This analysis distills and extends the findings and lessons of a September 2007 workshop in Brisbane, Australia on environmental water transactions. Two case studies were selected in water stressed basins - the Columbia (U.S.A) and Murray-Darling (Australia) Basins - where transactional approaches to environmental water allocation first emerged. The case studies draw upon practitioner perspectives and previous policy and economic analysis in two regions where shared political economic and physical conditions lend a strong analytical basis for comparison. A common set of policy and regulatory reforms has occurred in both cases - albeit in different forms and via distinct paths - to develop three enabling conditions: (1) establishment of rights to and limits on freshwater extraction and alteration; (2) recognition of the environment as a legitimate water use; and (3) authority to transfer existing water rights to an environmental purpose. However, these elements of policy reform are necessary but not sufficient for effective implementation; a second set of driving forces, barriers, and adaptations explains the ability to achieve larger scale ecological outcomes. These conditions include the physical, social and economic factors driving demand for environmental water allocation; administrative procedures, organizational development and institutional capacity to effect transfers; and adaptive mechanisms to overcome legal, cultural, economic, and environmental barriers. The case study analysis suggests that environmental water transactions can play an important role in establishing environmental water allocations, although water markets require ongoing institutional capacity and adaptive governance. The conceptual framework and empirical lessons generated through this cross-case comparison provide the basis for an expanded research agenda to evaluate the design and performance of market-oriented reforms as implementation experience accrues and new programs emerge in diverse ecological and political economic settings.     

Class/racial conflict,intolerance, and distortions in urban form: Lessons for sustainability from the Detroit region

In this qualitative analysis into the equity conditions of urban sustainability, an examination is presented into the complexity of one particular aspect of intra-generational equity, racial and class discrimination and its role in distorting urban form and in generating resource inefficient and environmentally destructive human activity patterns. The article, therefore, focuses on the role of discrimination itself in encouraging ecological degradation. The Detroit region shows that racial and class conflicts can facilitate the shaping of the urban built environment as one population sub-group, largely white and upper-income, attempts to distance itself from another sub-group that is largely black, lower income, and considered a threat. The outcome is not only disinvestment and decline in the urban core, but also excessive suburbanization, as whites seek homogenous urban environments and use space to increase the distance between themselves and the black population. The study shows that the lack of cooperation and tolerance across ethnic/racial and class subgroups facilitates inefficient low-density and scattered developments, and excessive degradation of natural ecological systems.     

自然资源价格构成成分的比重关系研究——以水资源为例

自然资源是经济社会发展的重要物质基础。但自然资源的价格机制存在弊端,导致在自然资源的利用方面短缺与浪费并存的局面。要发挥价格杠杆的调节作用,使自然资源得到高效、节约、可持续利用,不但需要弄清自然资源的价格构成成分,还需要研究清楚其各成分之间的比重关系,以便对自然资源的定价更趋客观、科学、合理。以水资源为例,基于德尔菲法和层次分析法,研究了自然资源价格构成成分比重的合理确定问题。     

Sustainability impacts of car road pricing: A computable general equilibrium analysis for Austria

Nationwide car road pricing schemes are discussed across Europe. We analyse the impacts of such schemes with respect to environmental, economic and social indicators of sustainability, also quantifying the trade-offs among these three dimensions under different charging principles and revenue recycling options. In our analysis we employ a computable general equilibrium (CGE) approach, develop a modelling structure for private transport and provide detailed empirical analysis for the case of Austria. Regarding the social dimension, it has often been argued that poorer households (and commuters) would have to bear a disproportionate share of the road pricing burden. We find the contrary, i.e. a stronger negative policy impact on richer households, and on a small group of intensive car users. The choice of revenue recycling is able to ameliorate the negative social and economic effects of road pricing, without reversing the desired positive environmental effects. For political feasibility, questions of distributional impacts are most urgent and therefore we address them systematically within a quantitative framework.