The Analysis of Transaction Costs in Water Policy Implementation in South Africa: Trends, Determinants and Economic Implications

Georgina W. Njiraini (), Djiby Racine Thiam and Anthea Coggan ()
Additional contact information
Georgina W. Njiraini: Center for Development Research (ZEF), Walter-Flex Strasse 3, University of Bonn, Germany
Djiby Racine Thiam: #x2020;School of Economics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa

Water Economics and Policy (WEP), 2017, vol. 03, issue 01, 1-30

Abstract: Water is a complex economic good. It requires optimal management to control rising scarcity and competition for use. South Africa like many other parts of the world is in the process of implementing market-based water policy reforms to attain equity, efficiency, and sustainability in water use. However, these reforms have not been entirely successful and water allocation problems persist. This could be due to many contributing factors, certainly, but this paper narrows down to identify possible transaction costs that would arise from the policy process. Transaction costs can be great hindrances to policy formation and implementation especially if they constitute a large component of total policy costs. However, transaction costs remain generally unmeasured and this study fills in this gap for the Olifants basin of South Africa. Specifically, the study identifies and quantifies transaction costs incurred by various stakeholders in the water policy process in the Olifants basin in South Africa. Further, determinants of irrigation farmers’ transaction costs are assessed using regression approaches. Results from this study allow evaluating existing policies ex-post for improvement purposes.

Keywords: Transaction costs; water policy reforms; South Africa; Olifants river basin (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S2382624X1650020X
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:wsi:wepxxx:v:03:y:2017:i:01:n:s2382624x1650020x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S2382624X1650020X

Access Statistics for this article

Water Economics and Policy (WEP) is currently edited by Ariel Dinar

More articles in Water Economics and Policy (WEP) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().