Water Resources and Economics最新文献

We nudged households in Torbat Heydarieh, a city in Iran, with social comparison and public environmental messages to decrease water consumption. In the former treatment, we provided subjects with their actual water consumption compared to their neighborhood’s minimum and average consumption. In the latter one, we illustrated some facts about the water crisis in Iran and each individual’s potential role in dropping it. We also incorporated perceptions and attitudes of our subjects on water consumption, extracted from our survey, to control for their possible impacts. Our results show that the social comparison nudge lessens the daily water usage of each family member by about 30 percent. In contrast, a nudge with public environmental messages does not have any effect.

This paper assesses the WTP and WTA for improvements and deteriorations, respectively, in irrigation water supply reliability. The assessment relies on a double-sided discrete choice experiment valuation using latent-class modeling accounting for preference and scale heterogeneity. This valuation approach is empirically implemented using a case study of a Spanish irrigated district significantly impacted by climate change. The results obtained show individual-specific preference heterogeneity in the WTA-WTP disparity, primarily driven by the different impacts of water reliability on farmers' utility (changes in business revenues and costs, uncertainty in business performance, and farm income effects) and interindividual differences in loss aversion (different degrees of endowment effect). Additionally, the significant scale heterogeneity and ordering effects found suggest that it may be advisable to use modeling approaches that account for them. Several policy-relevant implications can be drawn, including the non-neutrality of the initial allocation of property rights, repercussions on the cost-benefit of climate change adaptation measures, and the need to account for irrigators’ preference heterogeneity in order to design successful market-based instruments.

Water scarcity can constrain industrial development, while industrial development can exacerbate the high consumption of industrial water, resulting in the industrial water rebound effect. This study measures the economic contribution of industrial water to industrial economic growth with the help of the Cobb-Douglas Production Function. Then industrial water rebound effect is estimated in the context of technological progress. The empirical results suggest that the production elasticity of industrial water in the Yangtze River Delta is 0.121 and the industrial water rebound effect is 55.11%. Particularly, Shanghai has achieved industrial economic growth by strictly controlling the total amount of water use. While Anhui has the higher economic contribution of industrial water, its industrial economic growth mainly relies on water input. The overall industrial water rebound effect is relatively prominent in Zhejiang, Anhui and Jiangsu. Accordingly, the Yangtze River Delta urgently needs to advocate the development of the water economy, strengthen the rigid constraints on water use indicators, and promote water use efficiency in industrial enterprises.

In this paper, I investigate the joint impacts of top-down targets and social opprobrium on aggregate compliance with government mandates for resource conservation. I use data on urban water usage, local agency enforcement, and reports of water waste by private citizens in California during a period of severe drought in which a year-long mandate for water conservation was imposed. During the mandate, private citizens engaged in opprobrium by “drought shaming” customers engaged in “water waste.” I find that increases in complaints regarding water waste led to increases in follow-up actions by local agencies, increased levels of cumulative water conservation, and increased compliance with state-mandated targets. The findings suggest that private citizen involvement in the form of social opprobrium is an important aspect of local agency compliance.

By combining information on nutrient output from the Soil & Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and secondary data on local profits from different crop types, we devise a profit maximization problem subject to dynamic water quality constraints, which become gradually more restrictive over time. The solution aims to detect the optimal allocation of land parcels by crop type that maximizes the total net present value of landowner profits throughout the watershed. Over a nine-year time span, our model construct is applied to the Little River Experimental Watershed (LREW) in South Georgia. Water quality constraints involve the landowner adhering to specific permittable limits on numeric nutrient criteria recorded at the watershed outlet under various scenarios, including i) NO₃–N constraints, ii) total phosphorus (P) constraints, and iii) concurrent NO₃–N and P constraints. In the most extreme case, a reduction in aggregate profits of $24.1 million and $8.1 million was observed for combined NO₃– N and P constraints relative to commensurate solo constraints on NO₃–N and P, respectively. The Designing Watersheds for Integrated Development (DWID) model could support policymaking for ascertaining trade-offs between economics and water quality channelized through direct and indirect land use change considering environmental regulations in Georgia and beyond.

Water provides many important, and some essential, services. The quality of the piped water entering a household impacts the value generated by these services. Household response options include treating the piped water, using water from an alternative source, and selecting a community with different piped water quality. This intersection between location choice and community piped water quality may manifest as a house price effect. We adapt a residential sorting model to identify variables that characterize the relationship between piped water quality and house price. Many studies explore the impact of locational and structural attributes on house prices but very few include piped water quality. In our model, households in a given community produce water services using piped water, materials and capital or purchase water from an alternate source. A housing rental price equilibrium emerges after households sort themselves among communities varying in piped water quality and alternate source water cost. The presence, direction and size of the relationship between house price and community piped water quality depends on that piped water quality, the cost of treating it, and the quality and cost of substitutes. Absent accounting for these community level characteristics, both measuring and interpreting a relationship between property prices and piped water quality will be questionable. Our model results also suggest that if households know their piped water quality and can afford to invest in treatment or purchase of the substitute, they may adequately avert the impacts of poor quality piped water.

This study proposes a reservoir operation optimization framework to maximize the regional agricultural profit under the constraints of downstream environmental flow requirements and climate change. Three climate change models—CanESM2, MIROC5, and NorESM1-M—and the soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) were used to simulate the reservoir inflow in future periods under uncertainty. Minimum and ideal environmental flow regimes were embedded in the structure of the reservoir operation model to optimize the environmental flow needs and water supply and assess their tradeoffs. Cropping pattern optimization was used to maximize farmer profit. Particle swarm optimization was applied in the optimization processes. The method was applied to a case study in the Tajan River basin, Iran, with the results showing the environmental flow regime considerably reduces irrigation supply and has significant impacts on farmer profits. The results showed that cropping pattern optimization was not an effective strategy to mitigate the economic impacts of climate change under environmental flow constraints, but this assessment may not be generalized to other areas. Uncertainties related to the climate change models are a notable weakness of the approach and should be considered in future studies.

In this paper, we evaluate a randomized controlled trial in which households were given Home Water Reports (HWRs) that provided recent consumption information aside a social comparison. We estimate an average treatment effect of −2.4%, consistent with previous literature. The effects are significantly larger during months that require irrigation but are still statistically significant during non-irrigation months. We then investigate if the treatment effect depends on the specific message a household receives. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find no evidence that the type of message received (e.g., “good” or “take action”) has an impact on the average response size of 2.4% in our particular setting. We use these findings to motivate a discussion regarding study design in the context of RCTs being used to identify heterogeneous impacts when they are not specifically designed to identify such effects. Specific to our study, we use ex post power tests to demonstrate that our findings related to message type are likely due to sample size.

Ecosystem accounting produces data on ecosystems, their condition, and the services they provide in a consistent and comparable form with the System of National Accounts (SNA). This study focused on accounting of recreational ecosystem services in the context of freshwaters in Finland. We used georeferenced data to measure the extent and condition of ecosystems available for recreation, and representative population data to measure the actual use of the services. In the monetary valuation of the recreational service, we applied the simulated exchange value method, which has been developed for the monetary valuation of non-market ecosystem services in accordance with the SNA. We extend the simulated exchange value method to incorporate the effect of water quality on the number and monetary value of recreational visits.