Economics

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Farmers in the rainfed districts of South India are faced with repeated drought conditions, which adversely affect their livelihoods, placing their survival at stake. In this chapter, we empirically assess the drought survival potential of such households in three drought-prone districts of Andhra Pradesh, and evaluate the roles of human, physical, social, financial, and natural capitals in determining their resilience to repeated droughts. The key findings indicate that within the human capital category, health is not considered relevant for future drought survival, whereas higher skills are considered important by the households. Further, level of education and number of earning members in the household positively influence perceived drought survival. In addition, reliance on government intervention programs such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme for drought survival is higher among households with better health; such households also show greater reliance on common property resources for their income, implying that households with better health are able to better access or utilize livelihood opportunities outside of farming. The study also finds that watershed programs may have contributed to increased inequality in these regions; when compared to untreated regions, watershed-treated areas show improved drought resilience in some regions while there is no improvement in others. Results also indicate that the perceived resilience of farmers seems to have improved in terms of financial and health indicators in the watershed-treated regions despite a decline in their net crop incomes. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

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Integrated Assessment of Scale Impacts of Watershed Intervention: Assessing Hydrogeological and Bio-Physical Influences on Livelihoods

Evaluating the Determinants of Perceived Drought Resilience: An Empirical Analysis of Farmers' Survival Capabilities in Drought-Prone Regions of South India

In response to prolonged drought situations, water collectives have been promoted and exist in most water scarce farming regions to help them sustainably manage groundwater resources. However, the sustainability of the collectives itself is prone to groundwater depletion and to the risk of its irreversible future loss. The role of groundwater loss risk in determining the success or failure of groundwater collectives is inadequately understood. In this paper, a stylized dynamic optimization model of institutional participation is developed and results are analyzed for several cases of collective and non-collective farming behaviour. Results indicate that risk of groundwater loss may increase the tendency to free ride and exacerbate its depletion. This tendency may increase with a larger collective size when there are no deterrence mechanisms in place. However, when staying out threatens institutional stability, it is optimal for the profitmaximizing farmer to join the collective and help with groundwater conservation. © 2014 The Author.

Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics

Groundwater management through collective participation: Why some institutions succeed and others fail?

Abstract. Ensuring drought resilience for farmers is an important policy concern. Yet, a quantitative treatment of the concept of drought resilience has been lacking in the literature. This paper designs a mathematical model of drought resilience to assess farmers' survival strategies when faced with the prospect of repeated droughts. A key distinction is being made here between consecutive droughts and one-off droughts, as it is the former, which is of most concern to farmers as well as policy makers. The mathematical model is generalized to incorporate the possibility of more than one set of a certain number of consecutive droughts occurring in the future. Findings indicate varying implications for groundwater sustainability when resilience outcomes are directly linked to the length of a farmer's drought planning horizon as well as to the planned minimum consumption during drought years. Copyright © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Natural Resource Modeling

Mathematical modeling of drought resilience in agriculture

Climate change is forcing large scale structural changes in agrarian sectors in the developing world by adversely affecting water resources and threatening the viability of future agriculture. In the most drought affected regions, farmers must explore alternative skills for themselves and their children when faced with unsustainable livelihoods. In this paper, a stylized decision model of skill acquisition is developed in which farmers face the risk of an irreversible loss of groundwater due to climate change. Findings indicate that the risk of groundwater loss promotes higher efforts towards skill acquisition, in general, but skill seeker's own learning capabilities play an important role in determining the eventual outcome. Additionally, groundwater resources are depleted to fund skill acquisition through education, but when rate of skill depreciation is large or differences between skilled wages and agricultural income are small, groundwater depletion is delayed. A non-linear relationship between skill acquisition and groundwater sustainability emerges. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research

Climate Change and Human Capital Accumulation: Educational Decisions under Resource Scarcity and Uncertainty

Watershed Development (WSD) programs in rainfed dryland agriculture in India have been introduced in an effort to promote more sustainable management of the surface and groundwater resources, and to improve the livelihoods of farmers. This paper outlines the planned research for a project exploring the impacts of WSD at the meso-scale (∼100 km 2). The aim of the project is to develop and apply integrated models to assess cost effectiveness and water-related equity outcomes of stakeholder defined WSD scenarios; and to integrate and apply, in collaboration with project partners, the knowledge arising from the project at local, state and national policy levels. © IWA Publishing 2012.

Water Practice and Technology

Impacts of meso-scale Watershed Development in Andhra Pradesh (India) and their implications for designing and implementing improved WSD policies and programs

The issue of scale is examined in the context of a watershed development policy (WSD) in India. WSD policy goals, by improving the natural resource base, aim to improve the livelihoods of rural communities through increased sustainable production. It has generally been practiced at a micro-level of less than 500 ha, as this was seen to be a scale that would encourage participative management. There has been some concern that this land area may be too small and may lead to less than optimal hydrological, economic and equity outcomes. As a result there has been a move to create guidelines for meso-scale WSD of above 5,000 ha in an endeavour to improve outcomes. A multidisciplinary team was assembled to evaluate the proposed meso-scale approach. In developing an adequate methodology for the evaluation it soon became clear that scale in itself was not the only determinant of success. The effect of geographical scale (or level) on WSD is determined by the variation in other drivers that will influence WSD success such as hydrological conditions, land use and available institutional structures. How this should be interpreted at different levels in the light of interactions between biophysical and socio-economic scales is discussed. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

Fulltext

Hydrogeology Journal

Confronting scale in watershed development in India [Confrontation d'échelles dans le développement d'un bassin versant en Inde]

This dissertation consists of three essays. In the first essay, I study the interactions of students with limited English proficiency (LEP). It is vital to study these LEP students' (LEPs) interactions because immigration into the United States continues to usher many foreign students with LEP into American schools. Additionally, U.S.-born children from immigrant homes enter schools knowing little English. In order to understand how best to instruct these limited English proficient (LEP) students, it is important to examine how concentration of LEP students (LEPs) affects educational outcomes of the LEPs themselves. On one hand, having a larger number of LEPs allows teachers to deliver a more focused instruction. On the other hand, LEPs may speak in their native languages more often and practice speaking English less when they are surrounded by many other LEPs. In this paper, I examine the effects of classmate English proficiency on the educational outcomes of LEP 5th graders using administrative data from an urban school district. Specifically, I study how exposure to LEPs affects the achievement, mainstreaming and grade retention of LEPs using the idiosyncratic variation in LEP shares across cohorts in a school. I find having more LEPs in a cohort leads to higher math achievement, faster mainstreaming and less grade retention amongst LEP students. In the second essay, I partnered with Scott Imberman and Steven Craig. We identify the impact of gifted and talented services on student outcomes by exploiting a discontinuity in eligibility requirements and find no impact on standardized test scores of marginal students even though quality of peers and classes improve substantially. We then use randomized lotteries to examine the impact of attending a GT magnet program, relative to programs in other schools and find that, despite exposure to higher quality teachers and peers, only science achievement improves. We find that the relative ranking of the students change, as do their grades, indicating that either invidious comparison peer effects or teaching targeting may be important. In the third essay (with Adriana Kugler), we examine the impact of remittances on households' investments and consumption in Vietnam using the Living Standards Surveys. Given that households likely face budget constraints in Vietnam, one may expect for remittances to affect the decisions of households to invest and consume. In addition, since the unitary model of the household is particularly unlikely to represent households in developing countries, we also look at differential impacts when women receive a larger fraction of the remittances. We use an instrumental variables strategy to address the fact that households receiving different amounts of remittances and sending different amounts of remittances to women are likely to differ in terms of their observable and unobservable characteristics that correlate with investments and spending. We instrument the amount of remittances and the share of remittances going to women with the 1992 migration rate from the household's region of residence and the interaction between this variable and the share of women in the household. OLS results show that remittances are associated with better health of young, adult and older individuals, while the fraction of remittances received by women is associated with greater educational attainment and attendance and less child labor while changing the composition of consumption expenditures from all categories towards health expenditures. However, when we use an IV strategy, we find that remittances increase education expenditure while reduce food expenditure. More importantly, the fraction of remittances received by women increases the household expenditure on health relative to other household expenditures. The results thus show not only the amount of remittances but also the identity of the receiver matters in terms of increasing human capital investments for children and their family members.

ProQuest Dissertations and Theses

Essays on applied microeconomics

This paper designs a stylized model representing farming in water-scarce regions of South India to address the problem of managing depleting groundwater assets facing the threat of irreversible loss. Circumstances under which it may be optimal to forgo sustainable water use are evaluated in the context of farmers' wealth and land endowments, crop choices, and risk of groundwater loss. Several policy and management implications are derived. Additionally, it is argued here that attaining livelihood resilience will entail a transformation process involving tradeoffs between different capital assets where it may be optimal for a farmer to forego the objective of maintaining groundwater sustainability. However, mere forgoing of sustainability may not ensure resilience for all. Initial wealth and risk endowments come into play, especially in heterogeneous communities. © 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management

Natural resource sustainability versus livelihood resilience: Model of groundwater exploitation strategies in developing regions

The intention of watershed development (WD) programs in India is to improve the livelihoods of people and preserve the natural resource base, particularly in areas where water scarcity limits the development potential of rural communities. In practice, there are many complications to implementing WD programs in an effective and equitable way for all people within and between villages in a catchment. Our understanding of the potential implications of a program is often limited by the way in which we investigate the biophysical-social-economic system. Two common failings are (a) not properly considering the importance of the place, scope and scale of a problem and (b) using a disciplinary approach to make conclusions about the system as a whole. This paper discusses how we are addressing these issues as part of an integrated assessment project looking at WD in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. The multi-disciplinary project team includes agronomists, economists, environmental modellers, groundwater and surface water hydrologists, and social scientists who together are aiming to develop a holistic understanding of the impacts of WD on biophysical, social and economic systems. Key to the project philosophy is the inclusion of government representatives, communities, and non-government organisations (NGOs) in developing the researchers' understanding of the issues and complexities associated with WD and the critical questions that need addressing by the project. An integrated model is being developed that will incorporate crop production water use and hydrological (surface water and groundwater) models in addition to knowledge gained from extensive household surveys in villages in two case study catchments. The household surveys were developed based on discussions with NGOs working with the rural communities in Andhra Pradesh and are being used to examine economic and social outcomes (positive and negative) of WD for households. Measures of equity and resilience are being developed to measure differences in outcomes between villages (e.g. upstream, downstream) and within villages (e.g. income groups, gender, land ownership, etc).

MODSIM 2011 - 19th International Congress on Modelling and Simulation - Sustaining Our Future: Understanding and Living with Uncertainty

Integrated modelling for understanding watershed development impacts on social and biophysical systems

Evaluation of value of irrigation water is essential for supporting policy decision making relating to investments in the irrigation sector, efficient allocation of irrigation water and water pricing and for crafting policies to compare the variable impacts of water reform within and across sectors of the economy. This paper asks the question of how much an established irrigator would pay for water and at what price farmers planning to expand the area they have under irrigation would consider paying for the right to access water. An analytical framework is developed to estimate the net present value of both annual and perennial agricultural activities in the Murrumbidgee catchment. Using these estimates the total value of water used in Murrumbidgee catchment is estimated. An aggregate water supply curve is derived for the catchment from where water may be acquired from irrigators for environmental flows. © 2010 The Author. Journal compilation © 2010 Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Inc. and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd.