Suchergebnisse

¿Son los países desarrollados los culpables del deterioro ambiental?, y por tanto, ¿tienen los países subdesarrollados derecho a contaminar más? En este artículo se rebate esta tesis para mostrar que una dinámica de crecimiento que conduce al desarrollo de un territorio de renta baja debe ser por necesidad sostenible, si este país no desea liquidar sus posibilidades de desarrollo. Partiendo de las principales aportaciones teóricas de la economía del desarrollo, el artículo defiende la reciprocidad entre desarrollo y calidad ambiental. Se señala la dificultad que tienen los países subdesarrollados para abandonar un equilibrio de bajo nivel, y lo que esto implica en su riqueza (en concreto su capital ambiental), que es la que en última instancia determina su capacidad de generar renta en el futuro. Se requiere por tanto una comprensión profunda de la dinámica del subdesarrollo para frenar el deterioro ambiental.

Water is a key input in the production of many goods and services and under certain conditions can become a critical limiting factor with significant impacts on regional development. This is the case of many agricultural European Mediterranean basins, where water deficit during drought events is partially covered by illegal abstractions, mostly from aquifers, which are tolerated by the authorities. Groundwater overexploitation for irrigation has created in these areas an unprecedented environmental catastrophe that threatens ecosystems sustainability, urban water supply and the current model of development. Market-based drought insurance systems have the potential to introduce the necessary incentives to reduce overexploitation during drought events and remove the high costs of the drought indemnity paid by the government. This paper develops a methodology to obtain the optimum risk premium based on concatenated stochastic models. The methodology is applied to the agricultural district of Campo de Cartagena (Segura River Basin, Spain). Results show that the prices in a hypothetic competitive private drought insurance market would be reasonable and the expected environmental outcomes significant.

This paper presents a conceptual framework for both assessing the role of economic instruments, and reshaping them in order to enhance their contribution to the goals of managing water scarcity. Water management problems stem from the mismatch between a multitude of individual decisions, on the one hand, and the current and projected status of water resources on the other. Economics can provide valuable incentives that drive individual decisions, and can design efficient instruments to address water governance problems in a context of conflicting interests and relevant transaction costs. Yet, instruments such as water pricing or trading are mostly based on general principles of welfare economics that are not readily applicable to assets as complex as water. A flaw in welfare economic approaches lies in the presumption that economic instruments may be good orbad on their own (e.g., finding the "right" price). This vision changes radically when we focus on the problem, instead of the instrument. In this paper, we examine how economic instruments to achieve welfare-enhancing water resource outcomes can realize their full potential in basin-scale management contexts. We follow a political economy perspective that views conflicts between public and private interest as the main instrumental challenge of water management. Our analysis allows us to better understand the critical importance of economic instruments for reconciling individual actions towards collective ambitions of water efficiency, equity and sustainability with lessons for later-adopting jurisdictions. Rather than providing panaceas, the successful design and implementation of economic instruments as key river basin management arrangements involves high transaction costs, wide institutional changes and collective action at different levels.