Conference Paper
Economic and Distributional Effects of Dams: Evidence from Iran
No.
ERF30_69
Publisher
ERF
Date
March, 2024
We examine the economic and distributional effects of dams in rural areas. We introduce a novel identification strategy combined with a range of novel measures such as agricultural land rent, revenue, profit and population which are observed at a highly spatially disaggregated level in Iran for about two decades. We demonstrate that downstream areas tend to benefit from dams, whereas other areas do not benefit, or even lose, for example in terms of population. In particular, land owners of downstream areas benefit: the elasticity of agricultural land rent in downstream areas with respect to volume of dams is positive and about 0.03 to 0.05. Overall, the monetary benefits of dams identified by us, in terms of higher rents, wages and profits, cover only 20% of the investment cost of dams. We also demonstrate that using data at a more aggregated level, which is common in the literature, masks important distributional effects.
Authors
Hans Koster
Full Professor of Urban Economics and Real...
Authors
Jos van Ommeren
Fellow, Tinbergen Institute
Authors
Saeed Tajrishy
PhD Candidate, Sharif University
Research Associates
Mohammad Vesal
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Management and...