The water sector has economic and symbolic importance for citizens in developing countries. Water utility benchmarking is no panacea for improving water sector performance. Nevertheless, it can contribute to addressing four sources of conflict in the design and implementation of policies: cognitive conflicts (based on technical disagreements regarding how data might be analyzed and interpreted)...

In addressing the topic of decision making in the water sector, what has been suggested to be useful up to this point is benchmarking. This paper aims at exploring the relationship between the Operating Cost Coverage Index and customer complaints about water and wastewater services for 1898 water utilities in 11 countries, i.e., Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Lithuania, Peru, Poland, Russia, Se...

Irrigated agriculture has been analysed in Spain in recent years because of its high water consumption and its apparent ineciency. Several possibilities for water policy have been debated, in particular the pricing of irrigation water. This paper aims to contribute to this discussion by simulating the impact that a policy based upon the price of water could have on agricultural production, ana...

In order to allow contemporaneous autoregressive moving average (CARMA) models to be properly applied to hydrological time series, important statistical properties of the CARMA family of models are developed. For calibrating the model parameters, efficient joint estimation procedures are investigated and compared to a set of uivariate estimation procedures. It is shown that joint estimation pro...

Location and types of sensors may be integrated for simultaneous achievement of water security goals and other water utility objectives, such as regulatory monitoring requirements. Complying with the recent recommendations on dual benefits of sensors, this study addresses the optimal location of these types of sensors in a multipurpose approach. The study presents two mathematical models for ...