17
that the larger
the higher the scarcity level the state faces. To demonstrate the possible
severity in water scarcity, Figure 2 presents the reduction in water per capita for Angola and
for Austria (estimated b values are –49.12 and –2.49, respectively). Since our data on
population includes both actual population for
2000
t
and forecasted levels of population
for
2050
2000
<
t
the estimated scarcity level is both actual and perceived, respectively.
Values of
for countries sharing the same river are highly correlated and the same
is true for
values of river riparians. Therefore, we created principal component variables
that include the information on the intercept ( )—
INT_WATSCA
and on the slope ( )—
SLP_WATSCA
, both are based on a principal component analysis that was conducted at
various dataset specifications as will be discussed in the results section.
Governance
As in previous treaty work (Espey and Towfique, 2004) we included in the analysis a variable
that measures the health of institutions and governance in the countries that share the river
so as to obtain some measure of domestic stability. We used a 7-year (1998-2004) average of
the Corruption Perception Index (Transparency International, 2004 and data for 1998-2004
in http://www.transparency.org/). The notable features of this variable is that it is based on
perceptional data in each of the countries that share the basin, and also uses a long term
average of each governance level measured as GOVRN_CNT1 and GOVRN_CNT2. The
variable we constructed GOVRN_BSN is a simple multiplication of the values assigned to
the two riparians, GOVRN_CNT1 and GOVRN_CNT2. Since both these variables range
between 1-10, the values of GOVRN_BSN range between 1-100, with higher values
indicating better governance. We hypothesize that higher values of governance of the basin
riparians will lead to a higher likelihood of cooperation expressed in agreements. A similar
assumption was made in Espey and Towfique (2004), although they used other proxies for
governance.
Geography
The 13 geography variables were re-categorized into three groups, capturing the rivers that
fall under the
through-border geography and the rivers that fall under the border-creator
geography. The remaining rivers that fall under the other 11 configurations were included
Convention