In most urban cities across Australia, water restrictions remain the dominant policymechanism to restrict urban water consumption. The extensive adoption of waterrestrictions over several years means that Australian urban water prices have consistently not reflected the opportunity cost of water...

Lake Hume is a significant water storage located at the headwaters of the River Murray. It provides irrigation water, urban water supplies, flood mitigation and recreational benefits to a large and economically significant region. Water quality in Lake Hume has recently been the subject of...

The National Water Initiative and earlier water reforms have committed Australian governments to redressing environmental degradation caused by excessive extraction from rivers and groundwater systems. To date, the states, territories and commonwealth have identified a range of alternatives for...

Mandatory water restrictions continue to be the immediate response to urban water shortages in most major cities in southern Australia. Whilst generally rejected by economists on efficiency grounds, restrictions and the enforcement regimes used to invoke them are, nonetheless, viewed by some in...

In most urban cities across Australia, water restrictions remain the dominant policy mechanism to restrict urban water consumption. The extensive adoption of water restrictions over several years means that Australian urban water prices have consistently not reflected the opportunity cost of...

Notwithstanding the neoclassical predilection for markets as a means of allocating scarce resources, it remains the case that state-devised attenuation of behaviour is the norm for many resource allocation decisions. This is particularly apparent in the case of water in urban areas in Australia,...

“There is a water crisis today. But the crisis is not about having too little water to satisfy our needs. It is a crisis of managing water badly – such that billions of people and the environment suffer.” (World Water Vision 2000).The management of water resources is becoming increasingly...