Managing Groundwater in the Presence of Asymmetry PDF Download

Author: Siwa Mlavwasi Msangi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Author: Kimberly Burnett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317916247
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Growing scarcity of freshwater worldwide brings to light the need for sound water resource modeling and policy analysis. While a solid foundation has been established for many specific water management problems, combining those methods and principles in a unified framework remains an ongoing challenge. This Handbook aims to expand the scope of efficient water use to include allocation of sources and quantities across uses and time, as well as integrating demand-management with supply-side substitutes. Socially efficient water use does not generally coincide with private decisions in the real world, however. Examples of mechanisms designed to incentivize efficient behavior are drawn from agricultural water use, municipal water regulation, and externalities linked to water resources. Water management is further complicated when information is costly and/or imperfect. Standard optimization frameworks are extended to allow for coordination costs, games and cooperation, and risk allocation. When operating efficiently, water markets are often viewed as a desirable means of allocation because a market price incentivizes users to move resources from low to high value activities. However, early attempts at water trading have run into many obstacles. Case studies from the United States, Australia, Europe, and Canada highlight the successes and remaining challenges of establishing efficient water markets.

Author: Gail L. Cramer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317225759
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1026

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This Handbook offers an up-to-date collection of research on agricultural economics. Drawing together scholarship from experts at the top of their profession and from around the world, this collection provides new insights into the area of agricultural economics. The Routledge Handbook of Agricultural Economics explores a broad variety of topics including welfare economics, econometrics, agribusiness, and consumer economics. This wide range reflects the way in which agricultural economics encompasses a large sector of any economy, and the chapters present both an introduction to the subjects as well as the methodology, statistical background, and operations research techniques needed to solve practical economic problems. In addition, food economics is given a special focus in the Handbook due to the recent emphasis on health and feeding the world population a quality diet. Furthermore, through examining these diverse topics, the authors seek to provide some indication of the direction of research in these areas and where future research endeavors may be productive. Acting as a comprehensive, up-to-date, and definitive work of reference, this Handbook will be of use to researchers, faculty, and graduate students looking to deepen their understanding of agricultural economics, agribusiness, and applied economics, and the interrelationship of those areas.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 620

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Author:
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ISBN:
Category : Government publications
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Author: Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 42

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Author: Ellen Marie Bruno
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780438627680
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Many groundwater basins worldwide have seen significant reductions in the water table over time, and this is increasingly problematic in the face of climate change. Climate change is expected to cause more variability in precipitation and thus more variable surface water supplies. Groundwater acts as a buffer to fluctuations in surface water supplies, and is a critical resource in reducing the costs of climate change to agriculture. Concerns over groundwater management are particularly strong in California. The state passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2014 to provide a statewide framework for local agencies to manage groundwater. The act identifies overdrafted basins in the state and requires local groundwater agencies to correct groundwater overdraft conditions. Importantly, the groundwater law gives these local water agencies new authority to measure extraction, charge fees for pumping, and facilitate the trading of property rights for pumping. To inform water policy, I conduct an evaluation of the economic impacts of three policy instruments to manage groundwater resources: cap and trade, excise taxes, and command and control. In general, market-based instruments are more likely to obviate efficiency losses relative to command-and-control policies. Of these, cap and trade may be particularly appealing to water agencies that must eliminate overdraft because markets remove the uncertainty in reaching a management goal. However, market power in permit trading is a concern in this setting, and, if present, will reduce the efficiency gains from markets and potentially cause large distributional effects. In my evaluation of groundwater cap-and-trade, I account for the likely presence of market power in groundwater trading. Knowledge of how market power impacts the gains from trade is important for understanding the performance of markets relative to taxes in this setting. Since many water agencies restrict the export of groundwater outside basin boundaries, future groundwater markets will likely be spatially isolated. The exercise of market power may be a defining component of these markets due to the presence of large grower-shippers, the formation of coalitions among buyers and sellers, and/or competition among a few water agencies on a shared basin. To analyze the potential gains from trade in a groundwater permit market and evaluate the impacts of market power on both the magnitude and distribution of benefits, I develop a theoretical model of agricultural groundwater use and trading. The gains from trade in equilibrium are a function of five features of the model: the heterogeneity in demand for groundwater across users, the price elasticity of groundwater demand, the total allowable extraction on the basin, the allocation of permits among users, and the degree of market power. Using a flexible model framework that can reflect any degree of buyer or seller market power in the permit market, I identify the relationship between market power and the efficiency of water trading. I show that the overall efficiency impact of market power (by either buyers or sellers) is small, with a deadweight loss of at most 11% of the surplus under perfect competition. The distributional impacts, however, can be large. I evaluate the distributional impacts of market power by simulating how seller surplus and buyer surplus change as market structure varies. The flexible model of one-sided market power allows us to see how surplus measures change with any degree of market power. I show that the gains from trade accrue rapidly to those with market power. To evaluate the price sensitivity of groundwater users, I empirically estimate the price elasticity of groundwater demand with monthly, well-level groundwater extraction and groundwater price data. The data come from a basin in southern California that underlies the Coachella Valley, a major production region for citrus, dates, grapes, and vegetable row crops. Attaining reliable estimates of the groundwater demand elasticity has been challenging because micro-level data on groundwater extraction is uncommon and groundwater itself is typically free of charge. The Coachella Valley Water District is unique because it deploys a location-based volumetric pricing scheme for groundwater. Exploiting temporal and cross-sectional variation in groundwater extraction prices, I estimate a price elasticity that is the first of its kind to not rely on estimates of pumping cost for price. I report results from an OLS regression of the log of groundwater extraction on the log of prices, controlling for well and month fixed effects and conditioning on a rich array of observables, including weather, surface water use, and artificial groundwater recharge. With a statistically significant price elasticity point estimate of -0.17 that is robust to alternative specifications of the model, results suggest that increases in price modestly reduce extraction. This suggests that a tax on agricultural groundwater pumping will have small effects on basin-wide groundwater extraction, while significantly raising farming costs. Combining this estimate of the groundwater demand elasticity with estimates of the other model parameters, I estimate the gains from groundwater trade for the Coachella Valley. Results show that the gains from introducing water markets are large; economic surplus with trade is about 50% greater than under a command-and-control regime. Given an initial allocation of permits based on land holdings, the cost of compliance from a 20% reduction in basin-wide groundwater extraction can be reduced by 59% with trade. Furthermore, simulations show that the gains from trade remain large over a reasonable range of parameter values, meaning results are likely to generalize to other basins where trading might occur. The gains from trade remain large as the demand elasticity, the cap, the initial permit allocation, and the degree of heterogeneity in demand among users vary. Despite the potential efficiency losses due to market power, total economic surplus under cap-and-trade is still significantly larger than under command and control.In evaluating different policy instruments to manage groundwater for agriculture, my research contributes to the discussion of how best to manage this resource in groundwater-dependent regions around the world. In particular, I shed light on the role of markets to manage water in the presence of imperfect competition. Since the gains from groundwater trade are large even in the presence of market power, the potential of market power should not be used as an argument against the formation of markets.

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309499674
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Water of appropriate quantity and quality is essential for drinking, sanitation, and food, energy, and industrial production for any society and is derived for most needs from surface- or groundwater sources. Studies suggest that groundwater use in irrigation globally is increasing in total volume as well as a percentage of all water used for irrigation, with the demand for groundwater resources increasing as available primary surface water supplies are depleted. Particularly in arid regions, groundwater may be the most accessible water supply for any purpose, leaving groundwater withdrawals concentrated in areas that are already experiencing water stress. Even in the presence of direct ground observations and measurements of the water table, quantitative evaluation of groundwater storage, flow, or recharge at different scales requires remotely sensed data and observations applied to groundwater models. Resolving the interaction of groundwater storage, flow, and recharge at a scale at which basins are managed requires remotely sensed data and proxy data. In June 2019, the Water Science and Technology Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop to identify scientific and technological research frontiers in monitoring and modeling groundwater recharge and flow in various regions of the world. The goals of the workshop were to assess regional freshwater budgets under major use scenarios, including agriculture, industry, and municipal; examine state of the art research frontiers in characterizing groundwater aquifers, including residence time, quantity, flow, depletion, and recharge, using remotely sensed observations and proxy data; discuss groundwater model uncertainties and methods for mitigating them using sparse ground observations or data and other approaches; and consider our ability to detect which water management strategies that affect groundwater flow and recharge are being used and any changes in their use over time. This publication summarizes workshop presentations and plenary discussions.

Author: Lisa Marie Pfeiffer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Author: Calvin C. Chien
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 0203494156
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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This book is the documented result of an expert workshop, Modeling and Management of Emerging Environmental Issues, held at Penn State University. This event assembled four panels of modeling experts from the U.S. and Canada to discuss modeling technology development and application in order to promote sound and cost-effective environmental decision-making. This thorough analysis provides an overview on the state-of-the-art in current practice and identifies emerging research and development trends within modeling technology. Each of the discussions considers not only technical issues, but regulatory and cost factors as well.