Dams

Duflo, Esther; Pande, Rohini

Dams

No 11711, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The construction of large dams is one of the most costly and controversial forms of public infrastructure investment in developing countries, but little is known about their impact. This paper studies the productivity and distributional effects of large dams in India. To account for endogenous placement of dams we use GIS data and the fact that river gradient affects a district's suitability for dams to provide instrumental variable estimates of their impact. We find that, in a district where a dam is built, agricultural production does not increase but poverty does. In contrast, districts located downstream from the dam benefit from increased irrigation and see agricultural production increase and poverty fall. Overall, our estimates suggest that large dam construction in India is a marginally cost-effective investment with significant distributional implications, and has, in aggregate, increased poverty.

JEL-codes: H23 H43 O12 O21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-ene and nep-env
Note: PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Esther Duflo & Rohini Pande, 2007. "Dams," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 122(2), pages 601-646, 05.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11711.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Dams (2005)
Working Paper: Dams (2005)
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:nbr:nberwo:11711

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11711

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().