IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/wbrobs/v32y2017i1p1-20..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

“Well-fare” Economics of Groundwater in South Asia

Author

Listed:
  • Hanan G. Jacoby

Abstract

Groundwater exploitation has been instrumental in raising agricultural productivity and reducing rural poverty in South Asia, a region that accounts for nearly half of the global groundwater used for irrigation. Over the past three decades there has been an explosion of private investment in borewells and mechanized pumps, which has allowed access to groundwater to be widely shared. But this profusion of drilling and pumping has also led to serious groundwater depletion. This essay explores South Asia’s groundwater dilemma through the lens of welfare economics, drawing on evidence from India and Pakistan gleaned from a variety of sources ranging from agricultural censuses to specialized surveys. Policies to arrest groundwater depletion are also discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Hanan G. Jacoby, 2017. "“Well-fare” Economics of Groundwater in South Asia," The World Bank Research Observer, World Bank, vol. 32(1), pages 1-20.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:wbrobs:v:32:y:2017:i:1:p:1-20.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/wbro/lkw008
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Maria Jones & Florence Kondylis & John Loeser & Jeremy Magruder, 2022. "Factor Market Failures and the Adoption of Irrigation in Rwanda," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 112(7), pages 2316-2352, July.
    2. World Bank, 2020. "Managing Groundwater for Drought Resilience in South Asia," World Bank Publications - Reports 33332, The World Bank Group.
    3. Mazur, Karol, 2023. "Sharing risk to avoid tragedy: Informal insurance and irrigation in village economies," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 161(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • Q15 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation; Agriculture and Environment
    • Q25 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Renewable Resources and Conservation - - - Water

    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:oup:wbrobs:v:32:y:2017:i:1:p:1-20.. 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/wrldbus.html .

    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.