This page will be a depository for current economic perspectives on water quantity and quality management. Links will direct you to technical and policy literature that emphasizes the challenge of coordinating tradeoffs among different water users. This information, like this page, continues to evolve over time and will be updated as new research and reports are uncovered. This report focuses on the economic characteristics of freshwater resources and how these characteristics affect the potential establishment of property rights, user decision making, and the role of government in resource management.
Emphasis is on a broad review of the water economics literature.
This report examines the use of poultry litter and its relationship to increased phosphorus concentrations in nearby watersheds. Modeling suggests that use of phosphorus consistent litter application rules in nutrient management combined with permit systems have the potential to curtail the overuse of litter and prevent contamination of water. This study assesses the magnitude of costs of reducing water pollution incurred under the Clean Water Act in recent years. The approach taken in this study is to estimate not only recent nationwide costs of water pollution abatement but also to simulate and deduct from these estimates water pollution control costs that would have been incurred without the passage of the Clean Water Act. Mike Young, Australian National University COAG water policy reform agenda is used as a backdrop to illustrate how the ideas, propositions and recommendations being developed by ecological economists differ from those that have been developed by conventional economists.