Irrigation agriculture and income redistribution

Ezcurra Orayen, Roberto

Irrigation agriculture and income redistribution

dc.contributor.author	Ezcurra Orayen, Roberto
dc.contributor.department	Economía	es_ES
dc.contributor.department	Ekonomia	eu
dc.contributor.department	Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE	en
dc.contributor.funder	Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa
dc.date.accessioned	2025-07-23T15:43:10Z
dc.date.available	2025-07-23T15:43:10Z
dc.date.issued	2025-05-15
dc.date.updated	2025-07-23T15:31:38Z
dc.description.abstract	This paper advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that the adoption of irrigation agriculture during the preindustrial era is a predictor of current cross-country differences in income redistribution. Countries whose populations historically relied on irrigation agriculture as their primary subsistence mode tend to exhibit lower levels of redistribution today, confirming that certain historical practices related to agriculture can have lasting effects on present-day outcomes. The research employs several empirical strategies to address concerns about the potential endogeneity of ancestral irrigation, including an instrumental variable approach that exploits cross-country variation in irrigation suitability. Furthermore, the results remain unaffected after controlling for an extensive set of geographic, historical and contemporary factors that may be correlated with both historical irrigation and redistribution. The analysis also reveals that the contribution of ancestral irrigation to income redistribution has partly operated through its impact on the individualistic-collectivist dimension of culture and political institutions.	en
dc.description.sponsorship	Open Access funding provided by Universidad Pública de Navarra. Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Project PID2021-127119NB-I00.
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf
dc.identifier.citation	Ezcurra, R. (2025) Irrigation agriculture and income redistribution. Journal of Economic Inequality, 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-025-09672-x.
dc.identifier.doi	10.1007/s10888-025-09672-x
dc.identifier.issn	1569-1721
dc.identifier.uri	https://academica-e.unavarra.es/handle/2454/54444
dc.language.iso	eng
dc.publisher	Springer
dc.relation.ispartof	Journal of Economic Inequality 2025, 1-24
dc.relation.projectID	info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/AEI/Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación 2021-2023/PID2021-127119NB-I00/ES/
dc.relation.publisherversion	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-025-09672-x
dc.rights	© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
dc.rights.accessRights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.rights.uri	https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subject	Irrigation	en
dc.subject	Agriculture	en
dc.subject	Redistribution	en
dc.subject	Individualism	en
dc.subject	Political institutions	en
dc.title	Irrigation agriculture and income redistribution	en
dc.type	info:eu-repo/semantics/article
dc.type.version	info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
dspace.entity.type	Publication
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