Suchergebnisse

This paper examines efficiency and equity in groundwater markets with special attention to output sharing contracts and to the bargaining relationships between sellers and buyers, using household level data from Madhya Pradesh, India. Regression results find no significant inefficiency on farms managed by output sharing buyers, presumably because optimal input intensities are achieved through effective monitoring and contract adherence mechanisms embedded in long-term and intensive personal relationships between sellers and buyers. As for equity, the finding is that, while output sharing buyers pay higher water prices, the rate of premiums is merely 5 percentage points higher than the informal interest rate that they would have had to carry under other types of groundwater contracts. The results also show that buyers who have access to alternative water sellers pay lower water prices. These findings indicate that if the imperfection of credit and contingent markets in rural areas are taken into account, informal groundwater markets work fairly well in agrarian communities if monitoring and contract adherence mechanisms are embedded and a sufficient number of potential sellers are available.

Irrigation tanks are classic examples of common pool resources that have been traditionally managed by local communities. However, the tank performance under community management in Tamil Nadu has declined over the last few decades and threatened the local livelihoods. This study investigates the effect of community management on irrigation tank performance using village‐level two‐period data collected across 100 tank‐intensive villages in Tamil Nadu. To address the problems encountered in the subjective measures, this study adopts an objective assessment method using the satellite imageries of Landsat‐7 to derive tank performance measures. Satellite‐derived data are then incorporated with the field survey data and used in the analysis. The results show that community participation in tank management has a significant positive impact on tank performance, suggesting that strengthening traditional institutions in irrigation tank management can be a viable strategy for reviving tank irrigation systems.

This study compares the management performance of timber production among three management systems in Nepal: private forestry, community forestry with collective management, and community forestry with centralized management. While collective management relies entirely on community labor for the whole management, centralized management uses community labor for the protection of forests and hired labor for silvicultural operations, for example weeding, pruning, and thinning. We found that collective community management is less costly for the protection of planted trees but allocates less labor for the management of trees than private management. We also found that centralized management of natural forests leads to higher revenue and profit than collective management. These findings support the hypothesis that, while collective management is more efficient than private management for the protection of trees due to effective mutual supervision, profit-seeking private management or centralized management is more efficient than collective management for silvicultural operations due to superior work incentives. This study, however, failed to compare efficiency of private and centralized management.