Management of common property resources : intertemporal exploitation of village dams in Sri Lanka
type: CreativeWork
description: Village dams in Sri Lanka are owned in common by the villagers and the water in them is used for in-situ public good purposes and for the irrigation of their private rice lands. The water resource of the dam is replenished every year by the runoff from its catchment during the monsoons. Within a year, the water storage is dynamic, being influenced by periodic inflows and evaporative losses. The advent of the new rice technology, consisting of high-yielding and short-aged varieties of rice, has increased the scarcity value of water. However, there are inherent inefficiencies in its exploitation due to commonality. Making use of a two-period model and the concept of user cost, the common ownership of the dam and its contents have been shown to lead to inefficiently heavy extractions of water during the Wet Season with the result that the scarcity in the Dry Season is exacerbated. This inefficiency has been shown by comparing the net social benefits under the commonality allocation and that under the efficient allocation. The analysis incorporates explicitly the substitution possibilities between land and water so that the optimal land area is chosen for each level of application of water. The empirical approach developed in the thesis involves two aspects. First, the water storage is characterized by a transfer function model. A monte carlo simulation model, developed on the basis of this, is used to simulate the water storage behaviour for a number of years. Second, the marginal net social benefits for water use in the Wet Season and the associated user costs are derived. This utilizes a simulation model of the crop irrigation system, which is placed within a discrete dynamic programming framework. The water storage and the soil moisture are included as the state variables. This model implements the efficient intraseasonal distribution of a given amount of water. Crop response functions derived via this for different areas of rice are used to define a crop response f…
abstract: Village dams in Sri Lanka are owned in common by the villagers and the water in them is used for in-situ public good purposes and for the irrigation of their private rice lands. The water resource of the dam is replenished every year by the runoff from its catchment during the monsoons. Within a year, the water storage is dynamic, being influenced by periodic inflows and evaporative losses. The advent of the new rice technology, consisting of high-yielding and short-aged varieties of rice, has increased the scarcity value of water. However, there are inherent inefficiencies in its exploitation due to commonality. Making use of a two-period model and the concept of user cost, the common ownership of the dam and its contents have been shown to lead to inefficiently heavy extractions of water during the Wet Season with the result that the scarcity in the Dry Season is exacerbated. This inefficiency has been shown by comparing the net social benefits under the commonality allocation and that under the efficient allocation. The analysis incorporates explicitly the substitution possibilities between land and water so that the optimal land area is chosen for each level of application of water. The empirical approach developed in the thesis involves two aspects. First, the water storage is characterized by a transfer function model. A monte carlo simulation model, developed on the basis of this, is used to simulate the water storage behaviour for a number of years. Second, the marginal net social benefits for water use in the Wet Season and the associated user costs are derived. This utilizes a simulation model of the crop irrigation system, which is placed within a discrete dynamic programming framework. The water storage and the soil moisture are included as the state variables. This model implements the efficient intraseasonal distribution of a given amount of water. Crop response functions derived via this for different areas of rice are used to define a crop response f…
author: Mahendrarajah, S
language: en
date published: 1986
date modified: 2026-07-24T00:55:04Z
provider: Australian National University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Australian National University

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/122878