Arizona State and Local Government Documents Collection

The Arizona Water Banking Authority was created in 1996 to store the unused portion of Arizona’s annual allocation of the Colorado River. By storing this unused water the AWBA secures a dependable water supply necessary to ensure the state’s long-term prosperity. The plan is intended to govern the operations of the AWBA over the course of the entire calendar year.

The Arizona Water Banking Authority was created in 1996 to store the unused portion of Arizona’s annual allocation of Colorado River water. Until the AWBA was created, Arizona had not fully utilized its 2.8 million acre-foot allocation of Colorado River water and the state’s leaders recognized that leaving a portion of Arizona’s allocation in the river was a lost opportunity. The AWBA was created to provide assurances that water users within the state had secure, long-term water supplies.

The primary purpose of the Inventory is to identify storage capacity available to the Arizona Water Banking Authority to meet its water storage goals. Inclusion of a facility in the Inventory does not equate to a commitment by the AWBA to utilize any specific facility in the future. The AWBA will continue to determine annually which facilities will be used through the development of the Annual Plan of Operation. Conversely, not including a facility in the Inventory does not preclude the AWBA from utilizing that facility in a future Annual Plan. It does, however, preclude the facility from being utilized for interstate water storage, until such time as it is included in an updated Inventory.

Water banking is one of Arizona's most important water management strategies, and its success depends on effective planning. This joint plan helps advance the objective, articulated in the intergovernmental agreement among CAP, ADWR and AWBA, to develop a coordinated and cooperative planning process that includes distribution and recovery of water stored by the AWBA.

The theory of factor market distortions deals largely with taxing inputs. However, input subsidies are not only common in manufacturing. For example, U.S. agriculture is heavily dependent on input subsidies.
If water subsidies in the production of California cotton were removed, along with commodity payments, production of cotton in California would likely cease. Likewise, transportation subsidies were common in both the U.S. and Canada, and still prevail in the U.S.

The economic theories of New Institutional Economics, auctions, and welfare economics are used to analyze the potential for E-Commerce as an institution within the agricultural sector. We discuss the theory of the firm within the NIE paradigm and focus on the potential for E-Commerce to reduce transaction costs, search costs, and the costs associated with buying and selling livestock under various auction formats. We develop a theoretical model that captures the effect of Internet feeder-cattle auctions on Florida’s cattle market at three different levels in the marketing channel. We discuss the institutional arrangements and marketing mechanisms associated with the marketing of stocker and feeder cattle in Florida. We present the results of a survey distributed to cattle producers in North Florida regarding herd size, direct transaction costs of marketing cattle, and the implications of internet technology. Finally, we perform an empirical welfare analysis in order to estimate the impact of reduced transaction costs associated with Internet and video livestock auctions on cow-calf operators and backgrounders in Florida.

We investigate the underlying reasons for producers’ choice of marketing channels for stocker cattle in the United States. In addition to traditional public auctions, private sales, video auctions, and Internet auctions have been recently used in the marketing of stocker cattle. We find that while the number of marketing options may have increased in recent years, only relatively large producers can actually take advantage of these options. The marketing options for smaller producers are still limited due to their relative size. We also find that the number of cattle marketed privately and through video and Internet auctions is positively correlated with herd size. In addition, the New Institutional Economics provides insights into how herd size influences the choice of marketing channels.

We compare the current Canadian Supply Management regime in which producers and importers benefit from rent-seeking activities that set production quota and import quota levels with those under a tariff, in which producers partakes in rent-seeking activities in order to induce the government to introduce a favorable tariff regime. We explore three different quota-setting games: (1) the import quota and production quota are set at a level that arises from a Cournot-Nash equilibrium between producers and importers; (2) the producer marketing board acts as a Stackelberg leader, taking into account the importers’ reaction to its production quota level; and (3) the importer behaves as a Stackelberg leader, taking into account producers’ reaction to its import quota level. We compare these quota-setting games with two different tariff-setting games: (1) A non-cooperative game in which the government sets the tariff at a level that maximizes tariff revenue; and (2) A cooperative game in which producers, through rent-seeking activities, induce the government to set the tariff at a level that maximizes joint government and producer rents.

The purpose of the Inventory is to determine whether storage facilities exist in this state to meet the water storage needs of the authority for the following ten years. The Authority approved the initial Inventory in 1997. Because additional storage facilities are continually being constructed, the Authority updates the Inventory at least once every five years. The Authority has been annually updating all new facilities that could be utilized by the Authority in its Annual Report. It is important to note that the primary purpose of the Inventory is to identify the capacity that is available for potential storage by the Authority to meet its objectives. The inclusion of a facility in the Inventory does not equate to a commitment by the Authority that the facility will be utilized for water banking purposes in the future. The Authority will continue to determine annually which facilities will be used through the development of an Annual Plan of Operation. Conversely, a facility that is not included in the Inventory may be utilized in a future Annual Plan of Operation.