EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Irrigation Investments and Agricultural Productivity: Unveiling the Mechanisms and Impacts under Climate Change

Zhuanlin Wang, Jinxia Wang and Kaixing Huang ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Leveraging exogenous government irrigation investments and longitudinal household survey data over 15 years, we investigate how irrigation affects agricultural productivity under climate change. We find that the irrigation investment increased the share of irrigated farmland by 11.0%, which, in turn, increased per-area output by 14.9%, net agricultural income by 15.6%, agricultural TFP by 13.7%, and per-labor output by 36.2%. These effects are driven by four key mechanisms: increased use of high-productivity inputs, expanded cultivation area, labor reallocation from farm work to off-farm work, and mitigation of drought damage. The induced land expansion and labor reallocation explain the much larger increase in per-labor output. A cost-benefit analysis suggests a high rate of return to irrigation investment, with about half of the return stemming from labor reallocation that increased off-farm income. This study highlights the policy relevance of irrigation investments in improving agricultural productivity and accelerating rural transformation under climate change.

Keywords: irrigation investment; agricultural productivity; labor reallocation; climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 O13 O15 Q12 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-02-18
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/123705/1/MPRA_paper_123705.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:123705

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:123705