What Drives Water Utility Selection of Pricing Methods? Evidence from California

Water pricing is a demand management strategy to address the looming challenge of greater water scarcity in arid regions. Much of the literature on residential water rates focuses on evaluating the impact of pricing on household conservation. A separate, but rarely addressed question is what motivates a water utility to select a particular rate structure and the timing of doing so. We assess utilities’ decisions to adopt pro-conservation rate structures, such as increasing block rates and water budget rates. We develop a conceptual model of utility decision-making regarding the transition to pro-conservation rates and apply it to California.We examine the relationship between rate adoption and characteristics of utilities and customers using logistic regression and a balanced panel dataset of 323 California water systems from 2006-2015. We find a notable shift towards pro-conservation rates, which 71% of California utilities had by 2015, compared to 44% in 2006. Capacity factors associated with adoption include size of service population and customer income level, while motivating factors include peer adoption, greater customer engagement, and special district governance. Overall, this study provides insight into barriers to pro-conservation pricing, which can inform policies to enable transitions and advance conservation goals.

The dietary diversity and rural households’ nutrition security in itang special district, Gambella, Ethiopia

The malnutrition is pervasive are in the Itang special district of Gambella region. The children, elder, pregnant women, disabilities and other disadvantageous members of the households were extremely malnourished in the district. The main aim of this study was to assess dietary diversity and the rural households’ nutrition security in Itang special district. The study was carried out in Itang Special District among the rural households. It had collected the primary data through households’ consumption survey, key informants interview and body mass index. Then, the descriptive statistics mainly frequency and percentage were used to analyze the data via SPSS version 20. The field result revealed that about 54%, 40% and 6% of the rural households have low, medium and high dietary diversity in the district. Similarly, about 53%, 35%, 5% & 7% of the rural households were underweight, normal, obese & overweight respectively in the district. There was a low dietary diversity and high prevalence of underweight among the rural households in the study district. Thus, the Office of Agriculture and Natural Resources of the district, together with the health office have to provide the capacity building training on awareness of diversification of the income sources and credits facilities in Itang special district.

Potensi dan Masalah Destinasi Pariwisata Replika di Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta

Title: Potential and Problem of Replica Tourism Destinations in Special District of Yogyakarta Special Region of Yogyakarta is the tourism assets so it has the potential of tourism destinations to grow. The replica tourism destinations grow in contrast to the culture owned by the regions and the community. It is essential to see the condition and the development of the replica tourism destinations, their potentials, their problems and their opportunities as the driving force of tourism distribution. The method used in this research is directive interview. The overall result shown that the condition and the development is unstable, there was a leap of the tourist numbers but then decreasing. The involvement of local community and the increasing of tourism diversity became the potential of these destinations, but they had the problem of being sustainable. The replica tourism destinations grew due to the existence of tourists’ interests and they gave benefit to the local community but as time goes by, they were left since they were temporary.

District Reliance by Service Function: A Study of Public Financing of American Special Districts

Over the past several decades, special districts have proliferated and become the most rapidly growing type of local governments in the U.S. This study provides an exploratory investigation of special district finance reliance from two aspects, including expenditure reliance of general–purpose governments on special districts’ service delivery and financing mode of special districts. Using financial data collected from the Bureau of Census, this study provides detailed descriptive analyses on temporal trends and geographical patterns of expenditure reliance and revenue financing mode for four service functions. From the perspective of expenditure reliance, this study shows that special districts have replaced the role of general–purpose governments. In terms of revenue modes, special districts tend to rely on user fees, equating payers and beneficiaries of services. Moreover, this study shows that on which revenue sources the districts rely the most vary by service function and geography.