Inequality and the Sustainability of Agricultural Productivity Growth: Groundwater and the Green Revolution in Rural India

Last updated February 2008
 
Authors:
Andrew Foster; Mark Rosenzweig

Abstract
The paper documents a feature of groundwater extraction that was not previously recognized in the economics literature—that groundwater extraction exhibits strategic complementarity so that greater extraction by one farmer lowers the marginal cost of extraction for neighboring farmers. By implication, the size distribution of land in a village will importantly determine whether and how groundwater is used.