ESSAYS IN WATER RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND ADAPTATION, AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Moses Luri

In the wake of growing uncertainty around global future water supplies, and widening disparities in living conditions across nations, research into the factors propagating these issues is necessary to facilitate effective policy design. The following dissertation presents three separate studies on water resource management and adaptation, and economic development issues. The studies are a blend theoretical, quantitative and qualitative analyses, intended to provide insight on a range of contemporary water resource and development issues –– storage management impacts on a water system stability and resilience, economic growth effects on water withdrawals in the United States, and location and religion effects on living standards in Ghana. The first study investigates storage capacity and its management impacts on measures of system stability - resilience and reactance. The study combines economic theory with methods developed in ecology and water resource engineering to construct and simulate a model that reflects a simple managed water system with stochastic inflows, and measure stability (resilience and reactance) in a vector auto-regression framework. The study highlights how the concepts and measures of stability: resilience and reactivity widely studied in ecology apply in an economics framework. The second study analyzes U.S. economic growth effects on water withdrawals by the municipal, industrial, irrigation and thermoelectric sectors. Estimated water withdrawals in the U.S. reportedly experienced steady declines since 1980, with relatively steep drops since 2005. This study investigates the direct effect of GDP growth on water withdrawals by the above stated sectors. The study adds to existing research on income - water relationship, but also highlights growth effects on resource demand in general. The third study investigates geographical location and religious affiliation relationships with living standards in Ghana. While the link between location and economic well-being may be more obvious, the relationship between religion and economic well-being is more nuanced. This paper adopts a recently developed estimation approach to estimate average treatment effects of location and religious affiliation on living standards. The hope is that each of these studies will serve to inform, shed light or draw attention to the various relationships investigated. Moreover, hopefully provoke further investigation, discussion or policy analyses.

ESSAYS IN WATER RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND ADAPTATION, AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Metrics

Details