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The welfare costs of urban outdoor water restrictions
Author(s) -
Brennan Donna,
Tapsuwan Sorada,
Ingram Gordon
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
australian journal of agricultural and resource economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.683
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-8489
pISSN - 1364-985X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8489.2007.00395.x
Subject(s) - welfare , production (economics) , lawn , business , function (biology) , consumer demand , environmental economics , quality (philosophy) , economics , irrigation , natural resource economics , public economics , microeconomics , ecology , philosophy , botany , epistemology , evolutionary biology , market economy , biology
Outdoor water restrictions are usually implemented as bans on a particular type of watering technology (sprinklers), which allow households to substitute for labour‐intensive (hand‐held) watering. This paper presents a household production model approach to analysing the impact of sprinkler restrictions on consumer welfare and their efficacy as a demand management tool. Central to our empirical analysis is an experimentally derived production function which describes the relationship between irrigation and lawn quality. We demonstrate that for a typical consumer complete sprinkler bans may be little more effective than milder restrictions policies, but are substantially more costly to the household.