Two survey campaigns were previously envisaged in order to collect information on the main aspects of water use in the three SASS countries (Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia):
- the first survey campaign has been recently concluded and focused on 300 plots in 11 regions spread over an area of about 1 million km2 in the three concerned countries. Its main objective is to collect in-depth information on the spatial dimension of the behaviour of the primary water user;
- the second survey campaign started at the end of 2012 and aims to address the dynamic dimension of the behaviour of the primary water user. In fact, the second campaign will enable to follow and identify the changes in the behaviour of a number of representatives of irrigators especially in dealing with environmental changes and more particularly the consequences of the excessive use of ground water resources.
The second campaign included around half of the surveyed people of the first campaign.
The important innovation introduced in the analysis, which will be presented in details in this report, relate to the explicit integration of both the dynamic dimension and the spatial dimension. Indeed, thanks to the data collected by the second campaign, we are now able to conduct an analysis which takes into account the two important aspects (space and time) in an integrated manner. The Econometric analysis of Panel data, which was specifically conceived to jointly study the two effects, will help to improve the analysis process and provide more accurate estimations of the parameters to be used in the empirical evaluation of the hydro-economic model.
