WATER AS AN ECONOMIC GOOD IN IRRIGATED AGRICULTURE: THEORY AND PRACTICE

Petra J.G.J. Hellegers and Christopher J. Perry

No 29109, Report Series from Wageningen University and Research Center, Agricultural Economics Research Institute

Abstract: This report describes the results of the Water Valuation and Pricing project, which aims to provide insight into the relevance of economics to typical problems found in irrigated agriculture. It first considers the theoretical basis for the use of economic instruments, then considers their usefulness in the context of five case studies of irrigated areas - in Egypt, India, Indonesia, Morocco and Ukraine. The case studies confirm that competition for scarce water and shortage of funds are widespread. The study provides insight into the current price paid for water, the cost of service provision, and the value to irrigators of the water they receive. The analysis shows that volumetric pricing is unlikely to be relevant to demand management because the price of water at which demand and supply would be balanced is so high as to substantially reduce farm incomes. This socio-political problem, plus the technical and administrative complexity of measuring and accounting for water, and the crucial distinction between water applied to the field and water consumed by the crop make water pricing an unsuitable approach to balancing supply and demand.

Keywords: Resource/Energy; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 152
Date: 2004
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/29109/files/pr040312.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:aerirs:29109

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.29109

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Report Series from Wageningen University and Research Center, Agricultural Economics Research Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().