Inefficient water pricing and incentives for conservation

Ujjayant Chakravorty (), Manzoor H. Dar and Kyle Emerick ()

No 7560, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We use two randomized controlled trials in Bangladesh to study a simple water conservation technology for rice production called “Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD)”. Despite proven results in agronomic trials, our first experiment shows that AWD only saves water and increases profits in villages where farmers pay a marginal price for water, but not when they pay fixed seasonal charges. The second RCT randomly distributed debit cards that can be used to pay volumetric prices for irrigation water. This low-cost, scalable intervention causes farmers to place more value on the water-saving technology. Demand for the technology becomes less price-sensitive.

Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-env, nep-exp and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp7560.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Inefficient water pricing and incentives for conservation (2019)
Working Paper: Ineficient water pricing and incentives for conservation (2019)
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:ces:ceswps:_7560

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().