This book includes a set of papers from distinguished scholars who critically examine economic issues relating to the relationship between water and agriculture, with a special focus on irrigation. Employing state of the art methodologies, they address the most relevant issues in water policy. The volume offers a wide spectrum of innovative approaches and original and relevant cases with a focus on irrigated European agriculture. The topics analyzed include qualitative and quantitative issues, water markets, demand analysis, economic analysis, implementation of economic issues.

This volume brings together a number of prominent economic studies all of which deal with key water quality issues. The studies focus on the economic aspects of water quality including identifying the polluters' actions and incentives, designing and comparing control mechanisms, analyzing the costs and benefits of water quality programmes, and finally managing transboundary water quality. They all make recommendations for improving water quality through changing incentives, programmes and/or policies.

There is currently great concern throughout the world about the environmental problems associated with modern agricultural practices, particularly soil erosion, the side effects of pollution through excessive use of pesticides and fertilizers, and conservation of wildlife habitats, amenity landscapes and public recreational areas. Until recently, however, there has been little analysis of these unpriced side-effects, or (in economists' terms) 'externalities' and the related concept of public goods. This book is one of the first to bring together economic analyses of these external costs and benefits of agriculture and land use. It is written by authors from the UK, USA and continental Europe and will be of great interest to agricultural and environmental economists and scientists.

Most of the books published previously in the field of water resource eco nomics focus on particular aspects of water economics such as institutions, pricing or water markets, but none of them have given particular attention to methodological questions. However, the applied methodology within economic research has made some remarkable advances over the last 10-20 years. Some of these advances are of particular interest to the field of water economics. Therefore, we think that a book that focusing on methodological advances within the field of water resource economics and showing how these advances can be applied in economic analysis of water issues makes a nice complement to the existing literature in this field. We identified five areas where we consider the methodological advances to be of particular importance: 1) asymmetric information and game theory, 2) un certainty, 3) space, 4) water quality and 5) production and technology adoption. The selected papers for the book fall entirely within these categories. The book ''Frontiers in Water Resource Economics" draws to a great extent on papers which were presented at the 7^^ Conference of the International Water and Re source Economics Consortium, June 3-5,2001 held in Girona, Catalonia, Spain, This conference was jointly organized with the 4^^ Conference of Environmen tal and Resource Economics by the Department of Economics, University of Girona.