Bringing the Analysis to the Policy Context

Abstract

This chapter attempts to bring the evaluations reported in Chaps. 5 and 6 to the policy context, by looking at economic performance, variations and causal relationships associated with agricultural and water policies. We start by reviewing changes in land productivity, both rainfed and irrigated, from a temporal and spatial perspective. Since agricultural policies are markedly different across Spanish provinces, and since the EU Common Agricultural Policy also changed over the 1996–2006 study period, our spatial and temporal analysis yields conclusions about how Spanish agriculture has changed, notably in irrigated vs. rainfed farming, with profound impacts on the patterns of water use in agriculture. In the second section, we offer a dynamic analysis of the economic incentives for inter-basin and intra-basin surface transfers, with water scarcity being the major driving force. Water allocation and economic efficiency across regions and basins are the main focus of this section.