| Mohamed Salah Matoussi, University of Tunis III Saida Slama, University of Tunis III |
| Modeling a Centralized Water Resources Allocation |
| Session: C-12-7 Wednesday 16 August 2000 by Matoussi, Mohamed Salah |
| The mobilization of water resources has already peaked for technical, economic and environmental reasons while the demand, as a result of economic, urban and demographic progress, is exponentially increasing. If this tendency continues, the world is likely to undergo a water crisis in the near future. All countries experiencing chronic strains in water resources have to face the challenge of arbitration among alternative and sometimes conflicting uses. The water sector authorities are more and more aware that the classic arbitration associated with tariff policies cut off from the reality of mobilisation costs, leads evidently to economic inefficiency and lack of conservation. As a result, they are now in favor of radical changes in the management of water resources. However, because of the intrinsic characteristics of water as a commodity and the weight of past 'take-it easy' habits for generations of users, they wish to see a development of new procedures of management which will contribute to the achievement of an optimal valorization of the resource while taking into account those constraints. The main aim of this study is to model and resolve the problem of water allocation in the agricultural sector. It is hoped such a modeling will guarantee economic efficiency while taking into account quite explicitly what seem to be unavoidable constraints such as : i. Ensuring to old users utilities at least equal if not superior to their historical ones. ii. The fact that the present available supply is more and more limited. By integrating explicitly this constraint, our elaboration will show that, the water authorities, in their policies of optimal pricing, have to integrate explicitly in the new prices a scarcity charge in addition to the marginal cost of mobilization. iii. Water authorities information lack concerning the users valorizations of water resources. Hence we will present a modelization in the context of incomplete information. We note that the results obtained by our modelization generalizes those of Brill and al. (1997). |