Measuring welfare losses from interruption and pricing as responses to water shortages: an application to the case of Seville

Supply cuts and pricing policies can be used to ration water. The appropriateness of a given policy depends on the losses in social welfare which it generates. We find some drawbacks with the only method in the previous literature which deals with the issue of measuring welfare losses under supply cuts. We propose an alternative method. We compare the welfare losses under supply cuts and a pricing policy during the drought period of 1992–1996 in Seville, Spain, using both methods, and find that the results vary widely from one method to the other.