Until recently, smallholder farmers in the Transkei area had very limited access to a profitable market outlet for their wool. In response, the South African wool industry built shearing sheds, managed by a local association that sells directly to the brokers. This article investigates the...

In the hard rock areas of India, overdraft of groundwater has led to negative externalities, increases costs of groundwater irrigation and causes welfare losses. Groundwater markets are slowly emerging as niche markets to improve water distribution and to mitigate water scarcity by stimulating...

There is no consensus among researchers on the influence of scarcity on common pool resource use: some suggest that scarcity leads to prudent use, whereas others suggest that it will cause over-extraction of resources. This issue is particularly of interest for developing countries, where...

This article analyzes the efficiency of Water Users Associations (WUA) in the Cap Bon region (Tunisia) and studies its main determinants. The analysis is performed in two stages. First, the efficiency is measured via the nonparametric “Data Envelopment Analysis” (DEA) technique. The DEA...

This paper assesses the economic value of changes in the attributes of farmers’ irrigation water property rights in Tunisia. Changes on attributes generated by the transfer process of the property rights from the collective to the individual level in addition to changes in “constitutional”...

We measure the technical efficiency of unheated greenhouse farms in Tunisia, and propose a measure for irrigation water use efficiency (IWUE) using an alternative form of the data envelopment analysis (DEA) model. Technical efficiency measures the degree to which (all) farm inputs are used...

The paper aims to investigate the economies of scale of Water Users’ Associations (WUA) in Tunisia. During the last years there has been a lot of discussion in Tunisia about the optimal size of WUAs, which allows more efficient management of the water resources at the local level. In this work...

With increasing water scarcity, research on policy options for improved water allocation and governance becomes an urgent priority for many developing and developed countries. Evaluating institutional alternatives is however a challenging task. This article takes a comparative approach and...

All deviations from the frontier is inefficiency in deterministic DEA (DDEA); thus making the DDEA unable to accommodate the measurement and specification errors. But, most of the production relationships are stochastic in nature with some inputs fixed in the short run. This paper addressed the...

To ensure efficient water allocation and use, policy designers have adopted various strategies, including price setting, decentralising irrigation water management or improving water rights. Most of these strategies have been applied individually, without considering the complementary...