An Input-Output Assessment of Water Productivity in the Castile and León Region (Spain)

Abstract

Abstract:The failure in the past to acknowledge the limits of water supply and to decouple economic development from water demand has resulted in a water dependent growth model currently threatened by increasing scarcity and droughts. Consequently, there is now an urgent need to use sparse water resources in a more sustainable and efficient way. This demands a comprehensive understanding of water productivity and the linkages among economic sectors to illustrate the tradeoffs in water reallocations from productive sectors to priority uses (household and urban uses). This paper develops a methodology based on the Hypothetical Extraction Method to estimate inter-temporal direct and indirect water productivity. The method is applied to the Spanish region of Castile and León. Results confirm the existence of a relevant water productivity gap between the agriculture (the largest water consumer) and that of the other sectors, which are nonetheless largely dependent on the agricultural output (and thus, on agricultural water demand). Results also show that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, say about 1%, results in an increase of indirect water productivity in the manufacturing blocks (0.49% and 0.38%), energy and water (0.39%) and service blocks (0.41%), providing evidence of the existence of a Verdoorn's Law for water.

Scarcity in today´s consumer markets: scoping the research landscape by author keywords

“…Among different strategies for dealing with water scarcity, irrigation attracts significant attention from previous studies. Note that irrigation water is demanded not only in the agricultural sector (Pérez Blanco and Thaler 2014 ), but also in the urban sector (Hof and Blázquez-Salom 2015 ; Quesnel and Ajami 2019 ). Large landscape irrigation (with non-residential purposes) also accounts for a significant volume of water consumption (Morales and Heaney 2016 ).…”

Assessing the economic impacts of IT service shutdown during the York flood of 2015 in the UK

“…Similarly, Zhao et al [27] investigated sectoral CO 2 emission linkages in China at the regional level by integrating the HEM with a multi-regional IO (MRIO) model. With increasing focus on global climate change, the HEM has also been applied in resource studies, including water resources [28][29][30] and energy use [31].…”

A multiregional input–output optimization model to assess impacts of water supply disruptions under climate change on the Great Lakes economy

“…Exogenous industries are those who suffer direct disruptions due to environmental or policy constraints, and endogenous industries determine their output in terms of the disrupted industries. The use of hypothetical sector extraction or 'sector destruction' (Miller & Blair, 2009;Petkovich & Ching, 1978;Yoo & Yoo, 2009) has also been used to partition the economy into water sectors and non-water sectors and study the former as exogenous (Pérez Blanco & Thaler, 2014;Yoo & Yang, 1999). However, these approaches are able to impose resource restrictions only on a subset of industries which are treated as exogenous.…”