Impact evaluation of the irrigation management reform in northern China

The paper evaluates the reform in the irrigation sector in northern China, in particular, the transfer of irrigation management to water user associations or contractors from the village committee. With a set of panel data collected in randomly selected villages in northern China, a fixed effects model at the canal level with instrumental variable estimation is used to control for unobservable heterogeneity and endogeneity problem. The results show that WUAs have increased maintenance expenditures, the timeliness of water deliveries, the percent of irrigated area and the rates of fee collection. There are also improvements in irrigation systems managed by contractors but with magnitudes smaller than in the case of WUAs. WUAs or contracting, however, have limited impacts on water use and crop production. Discussions on reasons for the findings of limited impacts offer some suggestions for the next steps of the irrigation reform and call for continued research efforts to collect more data for further impact evaluations.