No Easy Exit: Property Rights, Markets, and Negotiations over Water

The role of water has featured prominently in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiation process, and in Arab-Israeli disputes in general. The allocation or reallocation of water rights is a particularly thorny problem. Recent work (Fisher, 1995) seeks to sidestep the issue of rights allocation by appealing to the Coase theorem, which provides conditions under which the efficient use of a good does not depend on the allocation of property rights. It instead emphasizes the small use value of the water in dispute, and concludes that a trade of “water for peace” should be eminently possible. Here, we provide a critique of this conclusion, based on two central ideas. First, the conditions of the Coase theorem are not satisfied, even approximately, and therefore the valuation of the use of water cannot be analytically separated from the allocation of property rights. Second, the existence of subnational interests, and the need to have an agreement acceptable to important actors at this level, creates a further difficulty for negotiating a resolution of any dispute. Even if a trade at the national level can be agreed upon, domestic losers must be compensated enough to make it politically feasible for the national government.

Food security, poverty, and economic policy in the Middle East and North Africa

In MENA, household food insecurity, which is closely related to poverty and undernourishment, is most severe in rural areas and concentrated within Iraq, Sudan, and Yemen. 25% of the MENA population may be poor and 7% undernourished. The key to increased national and household-level food security is pro-poor growth, driven by export-oriented, labor-intensive sectors. Agricultural sector policies should be subordinate to the pro-poor growth goal and not to the goal of food self-sufficiency. Such a strategy requires conflict resolution; macroeconomic stability; physical and human capital accumulation; reliance on markets and the private sector, and diffusion of ecologically friendly farming practices.food security ,Poverty ,Africa, North ,Middle East ,Development policies ,Economic policy ,

Inter State Water Disputes in India: Institutions and Policies

In this paper we argue that Indian water-dispute settlement mechanisms are ambiguous and opaque. We distinguish analytically between situations where cooperation is possible, and situations of pure conflict, where the initial allocation of rights is at stake. In the latter case, a search for a negotiated solution may be futile, and quick movement to arbitration or adjudication may be more efficient. However, in India, the process is slow, and effectively binding arbitration does not exist. The entanglement of inter-state water disputes with more general center- state conflicts and political issues compounds problems. We argue that these impacts can be reduced by a more efficient design of mechanisms for negotiating inter-state water disputes: some of the possibilities include a national water commission independent of daily political pressures, a federated structure incorporating river basin authorities and water user associations, and fixed time periods for negotiation and adjudication.

Socioeconomic Roots of Middle East Radicalism

The sources of Middle East extremism are profoundly complex and intertwined, composed of economic, social, political, and cultural dimensions. As important as the socioeconomic and political aspects of the present crisis are, however, the cultural difficulties are equally challenging, perhaps uniquely so

Between Tradition and Counter-Tradition: The Poems of A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott in The Canadian Mercury (1928-29)

The contents of The Canadian Mercury (1928-29), especially the poems of A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott, embody the kind of struggle with which an emerging strain of vitalizing modernism attempts to counter a prevailing strain of late Canadian Romanticism. Both Smith and Scott decry excessive description and precious diction, but their attempts to depart from the Romantic aesthetic are only partly successful. Because they represent an early attempt to establish a new poetry but still manifest some structural and aesthetic elements of Romanticism, the poems of Smith and Scott exemplify The Canadian Mercury's transitional poetics: between the dominant tradition in early twentieth-century Canadian poetry and the modernism that would replace it

Socio-Economic Roots of Radicalism?: Towards Explaining the Appeal of Islamic Radicals

The author addresses the critical questions involved in understanding and coping with the roots of Islamic radicalism. He provides particular attention to the links between radicalism and a series of crises associated with modernization in the Islamic World. The result is a thoughtful and probing study including policy recommendations for U.S. military and civilian decision makers that makes intelligible the complex subject of Islamic radicalism.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1790/thumbnail.jp