The aim of this paper is to check whether intergovernmental transfers for water projects accepted in 1986 can be rationalized by a simple efficiency criterion. The empirical findings support this conjecture only partially.

Current Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines use the interest rate as a basis for the discount rate, and have nothing to say about an intergenerationally fair discount rate. We derive this discount rate by differentiating a social welfare function with respect to perturbations in...