Does Water Efficiency Reduce Water Consumption? The Economy-Wide Water Rebound Effect

Jaume Freire-González

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2019, vol. 33, issue 6, No 18, 2202 pages

Abstract: Abstract Governments stimulate efficiency measures to save water resources, particularly in areas with high water stress and those that experience droughts. However, economic theory and some empirical studies tell us that the effects of efficiency improvements of a resource may not lead to a global reduction in the use of that resource. We assess the effects of improving water resources productivity in Spain on the global use of water using a dynamic water-economy computable general equilibrium model. We set an overall annual improvement of water efficiency of 50% and find that the economy-wide water rebound effect is 100.47%. This means that there are no savings of water after an efficiency improvement, and there is actually a slight global increase in water use.

Keywords: Water economics; Efficiency; Rebound effect; Computable general equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11269-019-02249-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:waterr:v:33:y:2019:i:6:d:10.1007_s11269-019-02249-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-019-02249-0

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().