Food Bowl or Folly? The economics of irrigating Northern Australia

Jared Dent and Michael Ward

No 02-15, Monash Economics Working Papers from Monash University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Australia’s northern area has vast but largely undeveloped land that would be arable if irrigated. The prospect of a northern ‘food bowl’ has drawn political support for irrigation schemes from both major parties in the 2013 federal election. In this study we consider the net economic benefits of allocating northern Australia’s divertible surface water to irrigation, a scheme that would require significant infrastructure costs in dam and canal construction. We estimate the benefits to northern Australia, using a Ricardian hedonic approach to forecast the economic value of constructing major new irrigation schemes that would be capitalised into agricultural land values. We use publicly available information from existing and potential Australian irrigation schemes to define the cost of constructing large water storages and distribution infrastructure, as well as on-farm irrigation infrastructure. We find that the costs of turning northern Australia into an irrigated food bowl are likely to exceed any benefits that would be capitalised into land prices by a multiple of between 1.1 and 3.2.

Keywords: irrigation; dams; agruculture; land value; benefit cost analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53 pages
Date: 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.buseco.monash.edu.au/eco/research/paper ... ustraliadentward.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://www.buseco.monash.edu.au/eco/research/papers/2015/0215economicsofirrigationnorthernaustraliadentward.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.monash.edu/business/ [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.monash.edu/business)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mos:moswps:2015-02

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www.monash.e ... esearch/publications

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Monash Economics Working Papers from Monash University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Simon Angus ().