OCR Text |
Show the economic impact ( in terms of household income and state - wide employment) of alternative uses of any additional future water intake available to the State of Utah. This second aspect of the study is considered again in Part III of this paper * The third aspect of the study is concerned with estimates of the projected increase in the demand for water intake over the period 1963 ( as our base year) to 1975* These last two aspects require further elaboration in light of the methodology used in generating the results of this study « In doing a study on the allocation of water, a fundamental resource whose control is subject to public regulation, the job of the economist is, or at least should be, to formulate some kind of an operationally useful welfare function whose arguments are the value criteria for determining, or at least forming a judgment about, what constitutes an optimum allocation of water. The welfare function must, in turn, be used with a model of the state's economy. While the concept of welfare certainly involves more factors than just household income or the related factor of employment, since the concept itself is not directly measurable, we have selected household income and employment as the two " proxy" value criteria or indexes of welfare. The conceptual framework or model used in the study is the Input- Output Model for the State of Utah.^ This framework allows a general equilibrium approach to the problem of determining the full effects of a change in water policy as opposed to a partial equilibrium approach which limits the analysis first reported on it in [ 8]. * See [ 7, pp. 1- 13] or the Appendix of this paper. 3 |