Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Daily Overview |
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Egg-Timer: Climate Change and Agriculture 1 Location: D-111 Session Chair: Gaurav Arora, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology | |
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Irrigation and Structural Transformation: Lessons from Half a Century in French Agriculture 1: University of Lorraine, AgroParisTech-INRAE, BETA, Nancy, France; 2: Climate Economics Chair, Paris, France; 3: University of Paris-Saclay, INRAE, AgroParisTech, Paris-Saclay Applied Economics, Palaiseau, France Access to water is a critical determinant of agricultural development, yet its redistribution via irrigation often reshapes local production structures in unequal ways. We exploit the staggered expansion of water-withdrawal infrastructure in France over the last five decades to estimate the long-run effects of irrigation access on agricultural productivity and farm structure at the municipal level (about 4 km x 4 km on average). Our main specification instruments local irrigation adoption with regional diffusion shocks in irrigation infrastructure (``adoption waves''), isolating plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of technology availability. Our IV estimates show that irrigation induces persistent structural transformation: one additional irrigation point in the municipality increases average agricultural productivity annually by 836 euros per worker and shifts production toward larger, more crop-oriented farms. Complementary difference-in-differences estimates reveal substantial consolidation dynamics: twenty years after first adoption, the share of large farms rises by 5 percentage points, while the share of small farms falls by the same extent. Overall, the findings emphasize that reallocating access to a scarce natural resource can permanently reshape local agricultural productivity and the organization of production. | |