Résumé
The balanced management of water resources depends on the different sectors water demands - agriculture, drinking water, industry or the environment - being matched by all the resources available. This balance can be obtained by tapping new water resources as has usually been the case, but also by water demand management. In the Mediterranean, the Fréjus conference held on September 12th and 13th 1997 made this its main recommendation because the restricted regional resources available no longer made it possible to develop supply-based policies without major cost to society, ecology or the economy. In sum, the regional use of economic tools to support a policy of water demand management remains very modest. There is however a wide range of policies in individual countries. Our survey also shows that the use of economic tools is more limited in the agricultural sector than in the supply of drinking water. This may appear paradoxical, contradictory even, given the respective potentials for saving water of the two sectors. Nevertheless, there are positive experiences to show in the sectors of drinking water and agriculture. However, the implementation of pricing instruments has several drawbacks and limits -environmental, social or technical.These experiences are full of lessons and clearly more work needs to be done to analyse them in more depth and clarify the debate on the relevance and efficacy of economic tools. A greater number of concrete experiences would help to consolidate the limits of application of economic tools as they appear today.Greater and more systematic understanding of the costs of implementing price reforms, and also the full cost of providing drinking water or water to produce food, is necessary to measure accurately the advantages of demand management policies.