Publication: How to Assess Agricultural Water Productivity? Looking for Water in the Agricultural Productivity and Efficiency Literature
Date
2014-07
ISSN
Published
2014-07
Author(s)
Scheierling, Susanne M.
Treguer, David O.
Booker, James F.
Decker, Elisabeth
Abstract
Given population and income growth, it
is widely expected that the agricultural sector will have to
expand the use of water for irrigation to meet rising food
demand; at the same time, the competition for water
resources is growing in many regions. As a response, it is
increasingly recommended that efforts should focus on
improving water productivity in agriculture, and significant
public and private investments are being made with this goal
in mind. Yet most public communications are vague on the
meaning of agricultural water productivity, and on what
should be done to improve it. They also tend to emphasize
water as if it were the only input that mattered. This paper
presents findings from a first attempt to survey the
agricultural productivity and efficiency literature with
regard to the explicit inclusion of water aspects in
productivity and efficiency measurements, with the aim of
contributing to the discussion on how to assess and possibly
improve agricultural water productivity. The focus is on
studies applying single-factor productivity measures, total
factor productivity indices, frontier models, and deductive
models that incorporate water. A key finding is that most
studies either incorporate field- and basin-level aspects
but focus only on a single input (water), or they apply a
multi-factor approach but do not tackle the basin level. It
seems that no study on agricultural water productivity has
yet presented an approach that accounts for multiple inputs
and basin-level issues. However, deductive methods do
provide the flexibility to overcome many of the limitations
of the other methods.
Citation
“Scheierling, Susanne M.; Treguer, David O.; Booker, James F.; Decker, Elisabeth. 2014. How to Assess Agricultural Water Productivity? Looking for Water in the Agricultural Productivity and Efficiency Literature. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 6982. © World Bank Group, Washington, DC. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/19344 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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