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Understanding the influence of tourism-linked factors on direct and indirect employment is important for tourism planning, particularly for tourism-dependent developing economies. Yet, related studies on developing countries are scant. This research considers trends of tourism growth in Sri Lanka over 1972–2018 using state-of-the-art machine learning methods: Classification and Regression Tree (CART), Boruta, hyperparameter tuning, grid search, novel robustness check strategies, and Random Forest. Our analysis confirmed that the growth in both direct and indirect tourism employment in Sri Lanka is influenced by three factors – total tourist arrivals, tourism receipts, and arrivals in the last quarter. The findings also reveal a notable seasonality impact on tourism employment, especially the growth of arrivals during the fourth quarter, for the country. Random Forest models suggest that an increase of tourist arrivals during the fourth quarter can largely compensate any detrimental impact on the growth of direct and indirect employment from a decrease in total tourist arrivals and tourism receipts. Overall, the article demonstrates that a systematic combination of machine learning approaches can provide rich insights from macro-level tourism statistics reported by tourism authorities, which in turn can guide policy formulation to boost tourism in the post-COVID-19 era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water institutions in India play a crucial role in managing scarce water resources and are central to economic development and poverty alleviation. Designing appropriate institutional mechanisms to allocate scarce water and river flows has been an enormous challenge due to the complex legal, constitutional, and social issues involved. The Indian water sector has been grappling with poor performance and deterioration of public (canal and tank) irrigation systems, high extraction levels of groundwater, and related economic and environmental problems. The objective of this article is to carry out a preliminary assessment of institutional mechanisms available to manage water resources in India. The article surveys various formal and informal institutional arrangements that are used at present and their design features in order to identify those institutions related to superior performance. The analysis indicates that crafting 'winning institutions' and the policy frameworks to strengthen them should take into account not only the proven criteria of institutional design but also the changing socioeconomic, political, and cultural factors., Introduction Water institutions (1) or institutional arrangements for water management play a vital role in managing and sustaining water resources as well as in economic development and poverty alleviation in [...]

The growing interest in customer engagement (CE) has triggered a new wave of reforms, particularly in utility regulation. Within the water sector, there has been a shift from a focus on cost‐reflective pricing toward customer‐centric pricing processes designed to identify customer preferences and expectations. The Victorian water sector in Australia offers a unique opportunity to explore the outcomes of these CE trends given the recent first‐time application of a novel Performance, Risk, Engagement, Management, and Outcomes (PREMO) framework. Based on in‐depth interviews with senior industry representatives from a diverse sample of Victorian water utilities, this paper critically analyses the scope, design, and incentive mechanisms that underpin the new regulatory process. Findings indicate that CE has potentially beneficial aspects to both the regulator and the regulated utility, including more transparency in capital projects and a better understanding of customer preferences in service delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Groundwater governance has become an intractable policy issue, which has many implications for the living standards and well-being of millions of rural poor in South Asia. Groundwater governance is complex as it is influenced by various hydrogeological, sociopolitical and socioeconomic factors. Unregulated groundwater extraction rates in South Asia have depleted the aquifers causing a raft of socioeconomic, environmental and human health problems. This paper analyzes de facto rights in groundwater markets and other emerging 'groundwater-sharing institutional arrangements' in India. Using a multi-dimensional property rights model, the paper decomposes de facto groundwater rights while drawing insights and broad policy lessons. The findings indicate that there is much scope for enhancing the 'small group groundwater sharing' governed by social regulatory measures. Moreover, distortionary subsidies for agriculture in general and groundwater development, in particular, have had an adverse impact of the resource use and merit further attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Jayanath Ananda Forest policy-makers increasingly recognise the importance of public participation in planning and policy-making endeavours. In many countries, public participation has been institutionalised into national forest policy. Despite the stated policy assurances, implementing participatory approaches has been a challenging task. This paper examines the public involvement in forest policy-making, particularly focusing on the Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) programme in Australia. The RFA is regarded as the most ambitious, expensive and comprehensive resource planning exercise ever undertaken in the country. The evidence suggestes that various participatory and deliberative approaches have been used under the RFA to allow for a plurality of environmental values, but that the integration of public values into final decision-making has been unsatisfactory. Process design, commitment and inadequate attention paid to conflict resolution can be attributed as reasons for sub-optimal outcomes.