Date of Award:

5-1984

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Economics and Finance

Department name when degree awarded

Economics

Committee Chair(s)

Rangesan Narayanan

Committee

Rangesan Narayanan

Committee

A. Bruce Bishop

Committee

W. Cris Lewis

Committee

Basudeb Biswas

Committee

John E. Keith

Abstract

Water flowing in streams has value for various types of recreationists and is essential for fish and wildlife. Since water demands for offstream uses in the arid west have been steadily increasing, increasing instream flows to enhance the recreational experience might be in conflict with established withdrawals for uses such as agriculture, industries and households.

It is the intent of this study to contribute to an economic assessment of the tradeoff between maintaining instream flow for river recreation use and offstream uses; that is, to develop and apply a method to measure costs and benefits of water used for recreation on a river.

Since market prices are not observable for instream flows, the estimation economic value of instream flow would present well known difficulties. The household production function theory was used to build the theoretical model to measure economic value of instream flow.

It was assumed that r e creationists were applying the same technology to produce a recreational commodity and other commodities. In order t o e stimate economic value of water used in the river, it was assumed that individuals were combining goods, services, and time as input to produce recreational services. Based on this procedure, empirical estimates of multisite demands were derived. A representative sample of 500 recreationists at three river sites were interviewed during the summer of 1982, to estimate empirical demand equation for recreational activities. Moreover, the corresponding compensated variation of consumer, from alteration of instream flow, were quantified.

To compute the cost of maintaining instream flow, a general stochastic mathematical programming model was developed. Using a mathematical programming model, three specific strategies for maintaining instream flows under two conditions of water rights transferability were compared. The first strategy was a deterministic model of expected instream flow. The second is a minimum-flow strategy and the third is a critical flow strategy. All three strategies are examined to decide the least cost in terms of expected agricultural output foregone to maintain the desired level of expected instream flow.

Policy implication are discussed with emphasis on application of the information to water management decisions.

Checksum

fb9bdfdddd1ceb75ceed05a531b1f244

Download

Included in

Economics Commons

Share

COinS

Copyright for this work is retained by the student. If you have any questions regarding the inclusion of this work in the Digital Commons, please email us at .