Decentralization and Environment: An Application to Water Policies

By means of a two-jurisdictional model, this paper analyses the optimal division of environmental policymaking functions among the different government levels, identifying the most appropriate level of decentralization in each case. The paper focuses on water resources policies, with an application to Spanish regions during the 1996-2001 period. The estimation of an environmental quality-consumption transformation function allows the implementation of a simulation to find the most efficient policies in the context of water resources.