IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wpaper/hal-00392381.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Distributional impact of dams: Evidence from cropland productivity in Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Eric Strobl

    (X-DEP-ECO - Département d'Économie de l'École Polytechnique - X - École polytechnique)

  • Robert Strobl

    (IES - JRC Institute for Environment and Sustainability - JRC - European Commission - Joint Research Centre [Ispra])

Abstract

We examine the distributional impact of major dams on cropland productivity in Africa. As our unit of analysis we use a scientifically based spatial breakdown of the continent that allows one to exactly define regions in terms of their upstream/downstream relationship at a highly disaggregated level. We then use satellite data to derive measures of cropland productivity within these areas. Our econometric analysis shows that while regions downstream benefit from large dams, cropland within the vicinity tends to suffer productivity losses during droughts. Overall our results suggest that because of rainfall shortages dams in Africa caused a net loss of 0.96 per cent in productivity over our sample period (1981-2000). However, further dam construction in appropriate areas could potentially lead to large increases in productivity even if rainfall is not plenty.

Suggested Citation

  • Eric Strobl & Robert Strobl, 2009. "The Distributional impact of dams: Evidence from cropland productivity in Africa," Working Papers hal-00392381, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-00392381
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00392381
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://hal.science/hal-00392381/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    dams; agricultural productivity; Africa;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-00392381. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.