Weather shocks, irrigation development and poverty: evidence from rural Northeast Thailand and Central Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Water is critical for agriculture in developing countries and climate change has created more extreme weather events. In this study, we examine the role of villages’ year-round irrigation in ensuring households’ irrigation to cope with weather shocks and investigate the effects of irrigation on income and poverty of rural households. Our results show that the availability of villages’ year-round irrigation significantly increases the share of irrigated land area at the household level, which leads to higher crop income and household income, and lower poverty. Therefore, developing year-round irrigation is recommended.

KEYWORDS:

• Thailand
• Vietnam
• irrigation water
• weather shocks
• multidimensional poverty
• instrumental variable

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the respondents from the surveyed provinces for their kind support and cooperation. We appreciate the effort of our colleagues at Leibniz University Hannover for data collection and cleaning. The constructive comments from Editor-in-Chief Cecilia Tortajada, Editor Dil Rahut, discussant Chen Ji and other participants at the virtual Asian Development Bank Institute (ABDI) Conference ‘Water Resource Management in Agriculture for achieving Food and Water Security under Climate Change in Asia’, 26–27 October 2022, and from five anonymous reviewers are acknowledged. M. H. Do would like to thank the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for financial assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2023.2233645.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge the financial support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) [grant number FOR 756/2] for the TVSEP project. M. H. Do received financial assistance from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).