In one way or another, all environmental and natural resource problems associated with overexploitation or under provision of public goods, arise from incompletely defined and enforced property rights. As a result private decision makers do not consider or internalize social benefits and costs...

This paper addresses water scarcity issues in the American West and examines the allocation of water through the appropriative rights system and the extent markets are used to reallocate water from low- to high-valued uses. The unique physical properties of water make it difficult to bound and...

Integration of trees on upland farms in the Philippines has been slower than expected and desirable from an environmental perspective. Our economic and risk analysis points to current policies as part of the problem. The study compares three domesticated indigenous timber trees (Shorea contorta...

Evaluation of off-site mitigation entails comparison of utility changes between two sites. Choice modelling has been used to identify community willingness to trade-off attributes for two different types of stream in New Zealand. Estimated utility functions are used to derive marginal rates of...

Evaluation of value of irrigation water is essential for supporting policy decision making relating to investments in the irrigation sector, efficient allocation of irrigation water and water pricing and for crafting policies to compare the variable impacts of water reform within and across...

This article evaluates irrigated agriculture sector response and resultant economic impacts of climate change for a part of the Murray Darling Basin in Australia. A water balance model is used to predict reduced basin inflows for mild, moderate and severe climate change scenarios involving 1, 2...

The fundamental problem for any scheme of water management that tries to maximise welfare across a river system is that of determining the optimal allocation at every point. The problem cannot, in general, be avoided by trading water rights because the price will not account for the effect of...

We examine the implications of the public trust doctrine in natural resource protection and conservation. A model of litigation and settlement among disputing parties suggests that the public trust doctrine introduces more costs and is more time consuming than would be the case with alternative...