Download or read book The Economics of Groundwater Irrigation in the Indus Basin, Pakistan written by Muhammad Arif Watto and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: [Truncated] This PhD study explored the economics of groundwater irrigation in the Indus basin of Pakistan where groundwater exploitation is escalating due to high irrigation water demands. Recent trends in groundwater withdrawals for irrigation and increases in number of tube-wells have brought into greater prominence the challenge to control groundwater over-exploitation. Besides this, hydrological assessments indicate that groundwater extraction rates have exceeded the annual recharge rates the available literature highlights the inefficient use of water resources in the irrigation sector. This study had four main objectives: 1) to review the causes and consequences of groundwater overdrafting in the region; 2) to investigate farmers' adoption decisions regarding tube-well technology; 3) to analyse irrigation water use efficiency for different crop enterprises; and 4) to estimate the derived demand for irrigation. Data used for analyses come from a survey of 200 rural households that predominately use groundwater for irrigation in the arid to semi-arid plains of the Punjab province of Pakistan. The review found that groundwater expansion in the Indus basin was mainly as a result of the rigidity of the surface water allocation system, increased crop intensities during the Green Revolution and the division of the Indus river tributaries under the Indus Water Treaty in the 1960s. Later, overexploitation of groundwater was as a result of increase in population and lack of effective groundwater management policies. A moment-based approach was used to analyse farmers' decisions to adopt tube-well technology when groundwater table is declining. The estimation procedure consisted of two steps. First, the moments of profit distribution were computed using an expected utility maximization framework. In the next step, the estimated moments were incorporated into a probit model to estimate their impact on tube-well adoption decisions. Analysis of tube-well adoption decision reveals that farmers are not risk-neutral. The results indicate that the probability of tube-well adoption increases significantly with increase in expected mean and variance of profit. The non-significant third moment (skewness) indicates that downside profit risk does not have significant impact on tube-well adoption. The highly significant fourth moment (kurtosis) indicates that adoption of tube-well technology decreases significantly in the presence of extreme events.