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.
Using a highly disaggregated multi-regional single-country model to analyse the impacts of the 2002-03 drought on Australia
TERM (The Enormous Regional Model) is a "bottom-up" CGE model of Australia which treats each region as a separate economy. TERM was created specifically to deal with highly disag-gregated regional data while providing a quick solution to simulations. This makes it a useful tool for examining the regional impacts of shocks that may be region-specific. We include some details of how we prepared the TERM database, using a national input-output table, together with regional data showing output (for agriculture) and employment (in other sectors) for each of 144 sectors and 57 regions [the Australian statistical divisions]. Using a 38-sector, 45-region aggregation of the model, we simulate the short-run effects of the Australian drought of 2002-03, which was the most widespread for 20 years. The effects on some statistical divisions are extreme, with income losses of up to 20 per cent. Despite the relatively small share of agriculture in Australian GDP, the drought reduces GDP by 1.6 per cent, and contributes to a decline in unemployment and to a worsening of the balance of trade.
MCNP(TM) Version 5.
The Monte Carlo transport workhorse, MCNP, is undergoing a massive renovation at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in support of the Eolus Project of the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASCI) Program. MCNP Version 5 (V5) (expected to be released to RSICC in Spring, 2002) will consist of a major restructuring from FORTRAN-77 (with extensions) to ANSI-standard FORTRAN-90 with support for all of the features available in the present release (MCNP-4C2/4C3). To most users, the look-and-feel of MCNP will not change much except for the improvements (improved graphics, easier installation, better online documentation). For example, even with the major format change, full support for incremental patching will still be provided. In addition to the language and style updates, MCNP V5 will have various new user features. These include improved photon physics, neutral particle radiography, enhancements and additions to variance reduction methods, new source options, and improved parallelism support (PVM, MPI, OpenMP).