Upgrading irrigation infrastructure in the Murray Darling Basin: is it worth it?
Infrastructure upgrades appear superficially to be a politically acceptable way of increasing environmental flows in the Murray-Darling Basin. From an economic perspective, their costs and benefits should be compared with other policy instruments. We do so using TERM-H2O, a dynamic regional CGE model with considerable basin detail. Voluntary and fully compensated buybacks are much less costly than upgrades as a means of obtaining a target volume of environmental water. Even during drought, when highly secure water created by infrastructure upgrades is more valuable, the upgrades remain too costly. As an instrument of regional economic management, infrastructure upgrades are inferior to public spending on health, education and other services in the basin. For each job created from upgrades, the money spent on services could create between three and four jobs in the basin.
The Impact of Climate Change on China＇s Grain Market and Food Security-- A CGE Model Approach
This paper examines the impact of climate change on China’s grain production and food security. The research is one of the four studies on future conditions of China’s food production system under the influence of climate change using numerical simulation methods, carried out under a national 973 project entitled “impacts of climate change on food systems in China and its adaptation”. The other three studies focus on changes in cultivated land area and food production, while this study incorporates their grain yield results into a general equilibrium model to simulate future conditions of the grain market. Our simulation analysis arrives at the impact of climate change by comparing such economic variables as grain production, consumption, and GDP growth rate between a baseline scenario and two climate change scenarios. Our results are summarized as follows: (1) In 2050, the total grain production will reach 689.683 million tons—584.264 million tons of total grain consumption and 42.808 million tons of exports. Without considering losses and inventory demand, in 2050 China’s grain supply and demand will remain well balanced, with a slight surplus expected. (2) Climate change is expected to benefit China’s macro economy and individual sectors. In comparison with the baseline scenario of no climate change, real wage, real
Did the metamorphosis from Export Processing Zones to Special Economic Zones improve the efficiency of trade enclaves in India?
In this paper, the efficiency of seven conventional Special Economic Zones in India is analyzed, by adopting a stochastic production frontier technique, for the period between 1986–1987 and 2007–2008.Results indicate that although the efficiency scores of these enclaves have improved over the years, specifically with the introduction of the SEZ policy (2000–2001), it is far below the threshold level as identified in the literature. Besides, one can also observe a discrepancy emerging between better export earning zones and efficient zones. On the determinants side, policy intervention and large geographical area, accompanied by clustering of units, are found to have impacted the efficiency scores of these enclaves positively.