Bibliographic record
Abstract
The claim is often made that more effective use of pricing and various water charges can remedy or completely solve problems of water scarcity, shortage or overuse. A common view is that users pay too little for water and, as a result, they use too much. The public or private agencies that supply water to users could levy higher prices willingly, or the regulatory agencies that manage and oversee water resources could enforce higher rates. Implementing these approaches in developing countries may present special challenges due to the high costs involved or due to inadequate resources to assign, monitor and enforce diverse rights to water use. However, are there reasons that other countries, not so constrained, have not implemented effective water pricing strategies? Is this pricing prescription really so straightforward? Economists, engineers and others have played a lead role in these policy debates, and economists continue to write volumes about many aspects of the issue. The purpose of this article is to review current approaches to effective water pricing and to examine the gap between these academic prescriptions and the current state of water allocation policy and practice. To what extent are more complex or comprehensive systems of water charges likely to fulfill the growing challenges of water scarcity? What steps are needed to bring theory into practice? The main conclusions reached here are that in many jurisdictions, schemes of administered prices may represent an attractive policy approach to promoting the overall efficiency of water use. The attainment of appropriate or efficient usage levels is synonymous with encouraging conservation and reuse, with investment and innovation in new technologies and practices and with achieving expected levels of water quality and security of supply. It is also consistent with capturing as fully as possible the many beneficial consumptive uses of water in situations where water is relatively abundant or inexpensive. Unlike the allocations that might be reached in some private market transactions for water use, an advantage of administered pricing is that it offers the ability to include, as part of the prices charged, society's best estimates of social costs related to downstream or future users, instream flow uses, and so on. Unlike private market outcomes, administered pricing also offers the ability to make the water pricing program revenue-neutral. A carefully designed rebate program can leave the average water user's annual household or business income unchanged, even while providing strong financial incentives to conserve. These issues and arguments are explored in the following sections. The discussion starts by examining the concept of water pricing and its rationale, focusing attention on those pricing approaches that promote the efficient use of water resources. The concluding sections highlight pricing issues that require further attention. Some brief illustrations of the state of water pricing in Canada and elsewhere show that despite initial steps toward policy reforms, considerable action is still required to harness the potential gains of effective water pricing. THE MEANING OF WATER PRICING Various systems of water rates, water fees and user charges are employed around the world as a means of influencing the processes by which water is provided and used, and as a means of cost recovery or revenue generation. In some places, these water prices are the principal form of water allocation. In other places, these prices are combined with various forms of licenses, permits, quotas, restrictions and other practices and customs that dictate how much water is used, where and at what cost. Where pricing is used, there may be a range of apparent price levels since, in practice, water systems have a number of stages in the supply chain. There might be prices assigned for bulk water withdrawals from a surface water or groundwater source that differ from other prices further along the supply chain. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".