User:Meghib

= Economic Instruments for Water Policies = Economic Policy Instruments are regulations that encourage behavior through market signals rather than through explicit directives”. They are a means of correcting market signals in order to convey the costs of externalities to economic actors and change their behavior. Regarding water policies, instruments experimented comprise those creating virtual market conditions, like charges for public services, payments for ecosystem services, tradable permits, and transfer payments such as taxation, levies, fees and royalties. They represent an alternative to more traditional command and control instruments. Whereas already introduced into climate policies, air quality and energy policies, their application to water policies represents some specific challenges.

In Environmental Policy, economic instruments have received increasing attention over the last decades, and have been implemented to achieve environmental policy objectives such as climate policy under the form of Emmission Trading. However, although EPIs have been prooved to perform better than alternative instruments (command and control instruments or voluntary agreements) in other domains of environmental policies, their application to tackle water management issues (drought/water scarcity, floods, and water quality) are beset by many difficulties both of practical and ethical character: Despite the Dublin statement on sustaniable water management adopted by the UN in 1992 stating, in its fourth principle, that "Water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognized as an economic good" the conception of water as an economic (and tradable) good is not accepted unanimously; especially Human rights groups see this principle in contradiction to the Right to water.

Charges
Charges for the use of water potentially aim at different objectives: (a) redistribution the costs water service operators bear for water related services among the users, cover costs for service provision; (b) distribute social costs of resource uses, for instance environmental costs, among users, (c) attribute water uses to the economically most efficient type of uses according to their ability to pay for water uses.

Tradable permits
Tradeable permits for the attribution of rights for water uses can be attributed either with regards to quantities of water that can be used or levels of pollution conceded to potential polluters.

(reduction of) Government subsidies
Direct or indirect subsidies of water uses consist mostly in not applying the "polluter pays" or user pays principle to water uses. They are sometimes applied on the base of equity considerations, being the right to water conceived a social right. From this structures for subsidies may consider different categories of water uses and quantities.

Payment for ecosystem services
Waterbodies provide ecosystem services consisting of flood protection, biodiversity support and remediation. These functions are generally not considered as economic benefits, although they are used as inputs for social activities. introduction of payment schemes can potentially support the maintenance of natural functions of water bodies.

Evaluating Economic Policy Instruments for Water Policies
The EPI-WATER research project funded by the founded by European Commission [] under the FP7-Theme 6, Environment (Including Climate Change), sets to assess the effectiveness and the efficiency of Economic Policy Instruments in achieving water policy goals, and to identify the preconditions under which they complement or perform better than alternative (e.g. regulatory or voluntary) policy instruments. Using a common multi-dimensional assessment framework, the project will compare the performance of single economic instruments or their apposite combinations with the performance otherwise achievable with regulatory (command & control) interventions (such as water restriction/rationing, licensing or permitting), persuasive instruments or voluntary commitments. Furthermore the project will identify remaining research and methodological issues that need to be addressed, in particular with regards to the further development and use of national accounting, for supporting the design, implementation and evaluation of EPI in the field of water management.