Hydroeconomic Analysis: History, Status, and Possibilities

This paper reviews recent advances in the motivation, conceptualization, development, application, and assessment of hydroeconomic models (HEMs), for which these models are implemented by conducting a hydroeconomic analysis (HEA). It addresses various dimensions of HEA, including problems motivating the need for an HEM, roles of HEA, policy debates informed by HEMs, important uses of HEA, recent achievements in the scientific literature performed by use of HEMs, future improvements desired in HEA, as well as one simple prototype HEM. Supplementary material is included describing some contributions made to HEA, with special attention given to four individual contributors to water resource economics generally, criteria for credibility, and a description of some of the more popular mathematical programming packages used to build an HEM.