Accelerated water savings and demand growth for farm outputs: impacts on the economy of the southern Murray-Darling Basin

Glyn Wittwer

Centre of Policy Studies/IMPACT Centre Working Papers from Victoria University, Centre of Policy Studies/IMPACT Centre

Abstract: It is possible that water efficiency in irrigation agriculture may improve substantially over the next decade or two. At the same time, worsening agricultural land and water scarcities worldwide may not be matched by agricultural productivity growth. This means that there may be strong growth in export demand for agricultural and food products in major agricultural nations. This study uses TERM-H2O, a dynamic CGE model with considerable detail in the southern Murray-Darling Basin, to examine the impacts of both fast water efficiency gains and strong export demand growth over time. Water efficiency gains will have relatively small impacts on the economy of the southern basin, but during drought years the gains are larger. The economic benefits on the southern basin of rapid export demand growth will be larger than those of water savings. Water efficiency gains and rapid export demand growth have differing impacts on the composition of crops and livestock production in the southern basin.

Keywords: Dynamic computable general equilibrium modelling; Water efficiency gains; TERM-H20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C68 Q25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.copsmodels.com/ftp/workpapr/g-232.pdf Initial version, 2012-04 (application/pdf)
https://www.copsmodels.com/elecpapr/g-232.htm Local abstract: may link to additional material. (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Accelerated water savings and demand growth for farm outputs: impacts on the economy of the southern Murray-Darling Basin (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cop:wpaper:g-232

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Centre of Policy Studies/IMPACT Centre Working Papers from Victoria University, Centre of Policy Studies/IMPACT Centre Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Horridge ().