ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the meaning, the objectives, and the criteria of water policy in order to give members of the legal profession an insight into the approaches and conceptual tools of economics. It explains economic criteria for the structure, the functioning, and the social performance of water law in the implementation of water policy. The economics of public water projects—such as benefit-cost analyses, formal programming, and other techniques of evaluating such projects and the whole problem of efficiency in government investment—constitutes only a segment, and sometimes only a small segment, of water policy. The economic literature focusing exclusively on the efficiency of public investment in water projects must be diagnosed as myopia that overlooks some of the most important issues of water policy. In identifying the economic objectives and criteria of water policy, one encounters what might be called the problem of unity of objectives and criteria.
