IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jeeman/v66y2013i3p639-655.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Water sharing agreements sustainable to reduced flows

Author

Listed:
  • Ambec, Stefan
  • Dinar, Ariel
  • McKinney, Daene

Abstract

By signing a water sharing agreement (WSA), countries agree to release an amount of river water in exchange for a negotiated compensation. We examine the vulnerability of such agreements to reduced water flows. Among all WSAs that are acceptable to riparian countries, we find out the one which is self-enforced under the most severe drought scenarios. The so-called upstream incremental WSA assigns to each country its marginal contribution to its followers in the river. Its mirror image, the downstream incremental WSA, is not sustainable to reduced flow at the source. Self-enforcement problems can be solved by setting water releases and compensations contingent to water flow. We apply our analysis to the Aral Sea Basin. We compute the upstream incremental compensations for the Bishkek agreement and asses its vulnerability with historical flows.

Suggested Citation

  • Ambec, Stefan & Dinar, Ariel & McKinney, Daene, 2013. "Water sharing agreements sustainable to reduced flows," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 66(3), pages 639-655.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jeeman:v:66:y:2013:i:3:p:639-655
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jeem.2013.06.003
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095069613000429
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jonathan Thomas & Tim Worrall, 1988. "Self-Enforcing Wage Contracts," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 55(4), pages 541-554.
    2. Wang, Yuntong, 2011. "Trading water along a river," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 61(2), pages 124-130, March.
    3. Gauthier, C. & Poitevin, M., 1994. "Using Ex-ante Payments in Self-Enforcing Risk-Sharing Contracts," Cahiers de recherche 9402, Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative, CIREQ.
    4. Jonathan Levin, 2003. "Relational Incentive Contracts," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 93(3), pages 835-857, June.
    5. Ambec, Stefan & Ehlers, Lars, 2008. "Sharing a river among satiable agents," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 64(1), pages 35-50, September.
    6. van den Brink, René & van der Laan, Gerard & Moes, Nigel, 2012. "Fair agreements for sharing international rivers with multiple springs and externalities," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 63(3), pages 388-403.
    7. Ambec, Stefan & Dinar, Ariel & McKinney, Daene, 2011. "Fixed Water Sharing Agreements Sustainable to Drought," TSE Working Papers 11-270, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    8. Ambec, Stefan & Sprumont, Yves, 2002. "Sharing a River," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 107(2), pages 453-462, December.
    9. Rene van den Brink & Arantza Estevez-Fernandez & Gerard van der Laan & Nigel Moes, 2011. "Independence Axioms for Water Allocation," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 11-128/1, Tinbergen Institute.
    10. Erik Ansink & Hans-Peter Weikard, 2012. "Sequential sharing rules for river sharing problems," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 38(2), pages 187-210, February.
    11. Gauthier, Celine & Poitevin, Michel & Gonzalez, Patrick, 1997. "Ex Ante Payments in Self-Enforcing Risk-Sharing Contracts," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 76(1), pages 106-144, September.
    12. Erik Ansink & Arjan Ruijs, 2008. "Climate Change and the Stability of Water Allocation Agreements," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 41(2), pages 249-266, October.
    13. Lynne Lewis Bennett & Charles W. Howe & James Shope, 2000. "The Interstate River Compact as a Water Allocation Mechanism: Efficiency Aspects," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 82(4), pages 1006-1015.
    14. Moulin, Herve, 1990. "Uniform externalities : Two axioms for fair allocation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(3), pages 305-326, December.
    15. D. Kilgour & Ariel Dinar, 2001. "Flexible Water Sharing within an International River Basin," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 18(1), pages 43-60, January.
    16. Gary D. Libecap, 2011. "Institutional Path Dependence in Climate Adaptation: Coman's "Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation"," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(1), pages 64-80, February.
    17. René Brink & Gerard Laan & Valeri Vasil’ev, 2007. "Component efficient solutions in line-graph games with applications," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 33(2), pages 349-364, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. António Osório, 2017. "A Sequential Allocation Problem: The Asymptotic Distribution of Resources," Group Decision and Negotiation, Springer, vol. 26(2), pages 357-377, March.
    2. Erik Ansink & Michael Gengenbach & Hans-Peter Weikard, 2012. "River Sharing and Water Trade," Working Papers 2012.17, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
    3. Osório, António (António Miguel), 2016. "A Sequential Allocation Problem: The Asymptotic Distribution of Resources," Working Papers 2072/266574, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Department of Economics.
    4. Erik Ansink & Hans-Peter Weikard, 2015. "Composition properties in the river claims problem," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 44(4), pages 807-831, April.
    5. Ansink, Erik & Houba, Harold, 2016. "Sustainable agreements on stochastic river flow," Resource and Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 92-117.
    6. Hurt, Wesley & Osório, António (António Miguel), 2014. "A Sequential Allocation Problem: The Asymptotic Distribution of Resources," Working Papers 2072/237596, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Department of Economics.
    7. Hojjat Mianabadi & Erik Mostert & Saket Pande & Nick van de Giesen, 2015. "Weighted Bankruptcy Rules and Transboundary Water Resources Allocation," Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), Springer;European Water Resources Association (EWRA), vol. 29(7), pages 2303-2321, May.
    8. Erik Ansink & Harold Houba, 2014. "The Economics of Transboundary River Management," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 14-132/VIII, Tinbergen Institute.
    9. Dagmawi Mulugeta Degefu & Weijun He & Liang Yuan & Jian Hua Zhao, 2016. "Water Allocation in Transboundary River Basins under Water Scarcity: a Cooperative Bargaining Approach," Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), Springer;European Water Resources Association (EWRA), vol. 30(12), pages 4451-4466, September.
    10. Osorio, Antonio, 2014. "A Sequential Allocation Problem: The Asymptotic Distribution of Resources," MPRA Paper 56690, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jeeman:v:66:y:2013:i:3:p:639-655. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Dana Niculescu). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/622870 .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.