For most of the last decade, water policy in Australia has been dominated by emergency responses to what was, on most measures, the worst drought in our history. Irrigators have received only small fractions of their normal allocations of water, while urban water users have been subject to...

For most of the last decade, water policy in Australia has been dominated by emergency responses to what was, on most measures, the worst drought in our history. Irrigators have received only small fractions of their normal allocations of water, while urban water users have been subject to...

In the past year, climate change has moved from political controversy to political consensus; at least, in relation for price-based policies the need to limit emissions. Uncertainties remain but with both major parties proposing to develop an emissions trading regime, it is timely to highlight...

In this paper we consider the problem of accommodating indigenous cultural heritage values in resource assessment and valuation. We suggest a need for price-based approaches to valuation to be replaced by or complemented with quantitative constraints, reflecting the requirement that rights...

We present a definition of increasing uncertainty, in which an elementary increase in the uncertainty of any act corresponds to the addition of an `elementary bet' that increases consumption by a fixed amount in (relatively) `good' states and decreases consumption by a fixed (and possibly...

Quiggin and Chambers have introduced the notion of invariant preferences, and shown that the only invariant expected-utility functionals are those associated with a quadratic utility function. This note identifies the class of preferences which simultaneously satisfy invariance, two-fund...

Australia is the world's driest continent and the intensity of conflict over water and water management has been increasing , especially in rural areas. By focussing on the recent federalist compact, National Wa ter Initiative (NWI), we explore the use of market and property rights instruments...

High population pressure and the rapid pace of human activity including urbanization, industrialization and other economic activities have led to a dwindling supply of arable land per capita and a process of agricultural intensification in South Asia. While this process has significantly...

The Murray-Darling Basin comprises over 1 million km2; it lies within four states and one territory; and over 12, 800 GL of irrigation water is used to produce over 40% of the nation's gross value of agricultural production. This production is used by a diverse collection of some-times mutually...

For much of the 20th century, the expansion of irrigated agriculture in the Murray Darling Basin, was treated as a self-evidently desirable objective, to be pursued without excessive regard to questions of economic costs and benefits. Irrigation seemed to offer a ‘droughtproofing’ solution...