Policy Instruments for Groundwater Management in the Netherlands

Petra Hellegers () and Ekko van Ierland

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2003, vol. 26, issue 1, 163-172

Abstract: In the Netherlands agriculture andnature have conflicting interests with respectto groundwater management. Insight into thesuitability of policy instruments to achieveoptimal groundwater level and extractionmanagement in the Netherlands is, however,missing. In this paper the suitability ofpolicy instruments for groundwater managementis studied. Changes in the institutionalenvironment and voluntary agreements seem to bemore suitable for groundwater level managementthan economic instruments. The currenthistorical groundwater extraction rightssystems together with the low groundwaterprices encourage low-value agriculturalgroundwater usage, whereas sprinkling bans andirrigation scheduling currently aim to reducelow-value use of groundwater. These extractioninstruments are less efficient than a systemthat considers externalities in the price ofwater or diverts water away from agriculturewhile encouraging trading. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2003

Keywords: agriculture; efficiency; policy instruments; water management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1025685621417 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:kap:enreec:v:26:y:2003:i:1:p:163-172

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10640/PS2

DOI: 10.1023/A:1025685621417

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental & Resource Economics is currently edited by Ian J. Bateman

More articles in Environmental & Resource Economics from Springer, European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().