Applying Interconnected Game Theory to Analyze Transboundary Waters: A Case Study of the Kura-Araks Basin

A number of environmental problems are international in nature, including many water management issues. Rivers, for example, do not recognize political boundaries. Therefore, pollution generated in one country can affect neighboring countries, while water extraction in an upstream country can affect water flow and water availability in a downstream country. The situation creates an interdependency among countries, which might lead to disputes over the management of transboundary water. Therefore, coordination among the countries is necessary for effective management of these transboundary resources. The focus of a recently published study (Khachaturyan and Schoengold, 2018) is the transboundary Kura-Araks Basin (see Figure 1 for its location), which is a major river system in the South Caucasus, with about 11 million people living in the basin. The countries in the basin are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Turkey, with Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia having over 80 percent of the streamflow. The Kura-Araks Basin is a primary source of water for agricultural, industrial, and municipal uses in the South Caucasian countries. The study determines whether there are economic benefits to be gained from cooperation in the management of the Kura River (shared between Azerbaijan and Georgia), and under what conditions cooperation is an achievable outcome. Azerbaijan withdraws about 35 percent of the total available renewable water resources while Georgia only withdraws about 3 percent

The Economics of Agricultural R&D

Agricultural research has transformed agriculture and in doing so contributed to the transformation of economies. Economic issues arise because agricultural research is subject to various market failures, because the resulting innovations and technological changes have important economic consequences for net income and its distribution, and because the consequences are difficult to discern and attribute. Economists have developed models and measures of the economic consequences of agricultural R&D and related policies in contributions that relate to a very broad literature ranging across production economics, development economics, industrial organization, economic history, welfare economics, political economy, econometrics, and so on. A key general finding is that the social rate of return to investments in agricultural R&D has been generally high. Specific findings differ depending on methods and modeling assumptions, particularly assumptions concerning the research lag distribution, the nature of the research-induced technological change, and the nature of the markets for the affected commodities

Towards Econometric Mathematical Programming for Policy Analysis

This contribution focuses in reviewing the development of positive mathematical programming towards econometric mathematical programming. Starting with the entropy approach it reviews alternative approaches and model specifications that appeared in the recent PMP-related literature for estimating those nonlinear terms that achieve the accurate calibration of optimisation programmes and guide the simulation response to policy scenarios. Combining recent contributions from this literature, it then proposes a possible framework to estimate and calibrate simultaneously model parameters ready to use for performing policy simulations