Yacov Tsur Terry sperm of fishes Rachid Doukkali.

Yacov Tsur Terry sperm of fishes Rachid Doukkali, and Ariel Dinar. 2004 Pricing Irrigation Water: Principles and Cases from Developing Countries. Washington, DC: Resources for the yet to be 319 pp., $65.00.

The stated plan of this book is to draw onward World Bank experience in order to provide policymakers and water managers with classifications for evaluating alternative ways for pricing irrigation water in a less degree than various circumstances. Such an endeavor is well worthwhile: improved pricing policies could help mitigate water scarcity vexed questions that increasingly pose a major impediment to shooting and development in many countries (see for example Gleick 2002) This work does contain important elements of a systematic framework for giving water managers and policymakers a fundamental understanding of the pro and studys of alternative pricing systems. if it be not that it ultimately falls short of providing a clear, comprehensive treatment that would be comprehensible to its chosen audience.

On the positive side, Chapter 3 bring outs a useful set of guidelines forward water pricing (which reappear later forward in an intuitively appealing narrative in Chapter 6) while Chapter 1 instants a nice overview highlighting the importance of linkages between activity at three levels: in succession the farm, in the water district, and in the macroeconomy. The water pricing guidelines conform to standard economic prescriptions: the desirability of marginal sumptuousness pricing, distortions due to average richness pricing, the need to withhold fixed cost recovery needs from distorting pricing and therefore water use at the margin, the ne for differential pricing of water from different sources or of different qualities (but not for different extremity uses, e.g., crops), the potential use of shut up rate pricing to reconcile marginal charge pricing with income distribution goals, the ne to incorporate the sumptuousnesss implementing pricing policies into furnish costs, etc. These guidelines are derived using economic principles at handed at an advanced undergraduate plain that should be well suited to water managers and policymakers. Demand for irrigation water is derived from profit maximization, as is store Irrigators' surplus and profits from water serve instead of measure social welfare. Intertemporal considerations are treated heuristically. The main weakness is treating economies of scale in water grant only implicitly, via consideration of fixed price recovery issues, an approach that creates any problems for the discussion of distortions fit to average cost pricing (the unstated assumption is that marginal expense is greater than average charge hence economies of scale are limited relative to demand). Overall, the treatment, while basic, come afterwards in capturing many important albeit as a common thing [i]or[/i] matter forgotten subtleties.

Far les fortunate are the book's attempts to illustrate application of these guidelines using empirical case studies of water pricing in surface water irrigation plots in Morocco, China, Mexico, southward Africa, and Turkey. Much of Chapter 4 is devot to a description of Howitt's (1995) mode of positive mathematical programming, which is used to estimate lop water demand-a topic unlikely to be of substantial interest to the book's putative audience. The analysis of a two-sector trade protoplast (used to derive the second-best conclusion that trade policy reform [reducing tariff barriers] can make society worse not upon by exacerbating distortions due to administrative water allocation) is equally unlikely to be of interest to (or comprehensible by) water managers and policymakers. Given the purported audience, it would have made more understanding to relegate the technical material to an appendix (as was in fact done with the discussion of computable general equilibrium [CGE] moulds used for the empirical analyses of Chapter 5)

The design of the empirical studies is to illustrate to what extent to apply the general guidelines. They do not work for that purpose well, mainly because there is little pensive analysis of the results. For example, to illustrate the inefficiency of charging for water onward the basis of land area irrigated, as is done in Mexico and Turkey the authors simply point not at home that the marginal value of water differs by dint of crop. But the authors do not consider the prices of alternative pricing methods, nor do they calculate the magnitudes of the social losse from inefficient pricing to papal court whether changing pricing methods would actually increase social welfare. Similarly, irrigation contrives in all five of the countries examined exhibit economies of scale, thus that marginal cost pricing is incompatible with satiated cost recovery (and hence financial sustainability of water projects) The authors attribute in each case to the general guideline that the volumetric element of water charges should not be designed to revive fixed costs. Again, however, the authors appear to have no interest in the magnitude of the question or the political and economic feasibility of alternative corrective measures. individual would want to know, for example, by what mode policies designed to achieve sated cost recovery would affect farm income, land and labor in farming, harvest production, and so on, in order to determine what measures should be taken to make up for costs (as well as whether replete cost recovery is in fact a reasonable goal).