Water Price Forecasting Method Based on Marginal-Cost Theory: A Case Study in China

The aim of the study was to create a hybrid forecasting method that could produce higher accuracy forecasts than previously used ‘pure’ time series methods. Mentioned methods were already tested with total automotive waste, hazardous automotive waste, and total medical waste generation, but demonstrated at least a 6% error rate in different cases and efforts were made to decrease it even more. Newly developed hybrid models used a random start generation method to incorporate different time-series advantages and it helped to increase the accuracy of forecasts by 3%–4% in hazardous automotive waste and total medical waste generation cases; the new model did not increase the accuracy of total automotive waste generation forecasts. Developed models’ abilities to forecast short- and mid-term forecasts were tested using prediction horizon.

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Analyzing the Performances of Water User Associations to Increase the Irrigation Sustainability: An Application of Multivariate Statistics to a Case Study in Italy

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su12166327 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (16) ◽

pp. 6327

Author(s):

Demetrio Antonio Zema ◽

Pasquale Filianoti ◽

Daniela D’Agostino ◽

Antonino Labate ◽

Manuel Esteban Lucas-Borja ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Performance Indicators ◽

Linear Models ◽

Regional Scale ◽

Water Price ◽

Water User Associations ◽

Large Variability ◽

Water User ◽

Economy Of Scale ◽

Self Sufficiency

Benchmarking techniques are useful and simple tools to analyze the performance of the collective irrigation in the Water User Associations (WUAs) towards an increase in service sustainability. Several benchmarking techniques have been proposed to process and predict performance indicators. Instead, some meaningful statistical techniques based on the distance of data samples, which overcome the limitations of the traditional benchmarking techniques, have never been applied to the collective irrigation sector. This study applies Permutational Multivariate Analysis of Variance (PERMANOVA), Multidimensional Scale Models (MDS), and Distance-Based Linear Models (DISTLM) as benchmarking techniques to evaluate the technical and financial performances of 10 WUAs in Calabria (Southern Italy). These benchmarking techniques revealed that the significant differences in the irrigated areas and financial self-sufficiency of the WUAs, shown by PERMANOVA, depend on the large variability of the remaining performance indicators. Both the MDS and DISTLM demonstrated that a higher number of associated users and larger irrigation service coverage allows an increase in the irrigated areas; this enlargement is facilitated if the water price and the size of the personnel staff decrease. The WUAs’ self-sufficiency is mainly influenced by the number of workers and the maintenance, organization, and management costs, while the impacts of the due service fees and water price are more limited; it is also convenient to increase the number of the associated farmers since this increases the economy of scale and the gross revenues of the irrigation service. Overall, from the analysis carried out for the regional case study, these benchmarking techniques seem to be powerful and easy tools to identify the problems of the irrigation service and help in planning the most suitable policies to improve the sustainability of the collective irrigation at the regional scale.

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