Impact of Participation in Groundwater Market on Farmland, Income, and Water Access: Evidence from Pakistan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors, it is an interesting paper. The paper quality will improve if it is revised before publication in the journal. While revising the paper, the author(s) should give attention to few comments and suggestions given below.

 

(1) The paper title is very long. Make it short. One alternative title may be : Impact of Participation in Groundwater Market on Farmland, Income and Water Access: Evidence from Pakistan. Other short titles are also possible.

 

(2) Abstract is well written. But please try to write the main study objective clearly.

 

(3) Please try to improve the overall result analysis in section 3 (Results and Discussion). Own results should be compared more with other existing results. Some of the references may be brought from studies mentioned in section 1. Alternatively, a small section may be given for literature review on various issues related to groundwater markets.

 

(4) Please give the theoretical justification behind the study, preferably as a small section, before second section.

 

(5) The study directly goes to describe sample selection, result analysis and concluding remarks. It will be nice if some information on irrigation conditions in Pakistan and water market information, if any, on the sample region (compared to other regions in Pakistan) from secondary sources are discussed.

 

(6) Authors mainly discuss informal groundwater markets and benefits obtained by sample farmers. At the end of the paper, authors suggest government policy actions on the over-exploitation of water by private users/sellers. Government actions are generally formal in nature. Why authors can not suggest sample farmers to form private committees or organizations and formulate rules/regulations to control exploitations of groundwater? This should be clarified.

 

 

(7) Main findings of the study have important policy implications. Authors have given some suggestions in section 4. It would be better if authors can also give some policy decisions already taken or implemented by the government of Pakistan on water market and over-extraction of ground water.

 

(8) Please do proper editing/corrections of data Tables, Figures and some sentences.

 

(9) Every study suffers from some limitations, like data problem, model estimation/specification problem etc. But authors have not mentioned such limitations at the concluding section.

 

The paper should be revised in the light of above comments and suggestions before accepting for publication in the journal.

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Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I enjoyed reading the article: the presentation is clear and well-organized. There are some basic data missing, however.

1. The authors have to tell us somewhere how the 360 respondents broke down by water-market categories, i.e., how many respondents in each category of buyers, sellers, and self-user. Perhaps the number of respondents in each category can be added in the first line in Table 1.
2. There is an implicit claim that buyers are "small farmers" whereas sellers and self-users are "large". We need a table or a graph showing the relative size (in acres) of the farms in the three groups.

There are some minor language mistakes that have to be corrected.

1. On line 278, probably "degrees of freedom" instead of "degree of freedom".
2. On lines 342 and 343, something seems to be missing between "participants" and "nonparticipants".
3. On line 577, correct "Loren" to "Lorenz".

These are sporadic mistypes that caught my eye in reading. The authors should go carefully over the entire manuscript to weed out similar instances.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

REPORT OF REVIEW

Manuscript ID: water-1712057

TITLE OF PAPER:

Participation in groundwater market improves farmland utilization, farmers’ incomes, water access equity and reduces income inequality: Evidence from a field survey in Pakistan.

 

My opinion is that the idea of the articles is interesting, methodologically well established and that the results obtained are scientifically relevant. The author has succeeded to aggregate and process an impressive amount of data, as well as to obtain valuable results.

Specific comments:

1. Please explain what it means: „Cropping intensity”, „Net sown area”, „Gross cropped area”?
2. To what extent does the cropping intensity result from the access to groundwater irrigation, and to what extent does it result from the crop structure?
3. What features of farms were adopted to distinguish groups of similar farms - propensity score matching?
4. The aim of the research was to suggest appropriate policy measures in the context of the growing groundwater scarcity in the Punjab province - what measures do the authors propose?

Best regards

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

General comment to Authors:

Overall, I think the work is interesting and the methodology is appropriate to achieve the purposes of the study. The manuscript presents an important contribution to the existing literature on the assessment of impact of using groundwater resources in Pakistan on the distribution of income and crop productivity. To show that the authors attempted to define different indicators and used multivariate analysis. I However, I still have some concerns and comments that should clarified and addressed which could improve the quality of the manuscript before publication.

Specific comments:

1. The title should be shorter and more concise. The tile should reflect the main message and keywords of the research study that the authors want to convey to readers.
2. The authors neglect an important factor that could affect the conclusions of the research study. I think it would be important to include the type of irrigation systems used across farmers to interpret well the water productivity. The authors are silent here. As well know, the type of irrigation system could affect the efficiency and productivity across farms. It is an important aspect should be considered in the analysis which is not clear for the readers.
3. In the same context, it would be better estimating the production function using stochastic production frontier or data envelopment analysis techniques to derive more reliable estimates and impacts of productive inputs on the wheat productivity. Using this would allow you to determine how farmers are efficient across different groups. As it is shown the determinant coefficient (R² =0.49) is very low and the model cannot adequately express the variation across observations.  
4. L215: it should horizon equity not vertical equity
5. L333: ? is also a regression coefficient, you should explain the significance of each parameter (? and ?) for non-familiar readers with statistical aspects.
6. Regarding the impact of participation in Groundwater Markets on Farmers’ Income, the authors used two concepts difference-in-difference analysis and propensity score matching (PSM) technique, which are totally different. It is unclear which technique the authors have used to compute the impact. The authors should be more specific regarding this point.
7. Table 4: it is not clear how the author define and estimate the elasticity, which equation the authors used to calculate the elasticity. More details needed to understand better the results.
8.  L481-L485: As commented earlier the authors talk about the frequency of irrigation but nothing regarding the irrigation system used by farmers. Is there any difference between irrigation system or it is common among farmers of each region? More clarification about that is needed to isolate the impact of efficiency and management aspects of irrigation system type.
9. L487-490: “Impact of Water Markets on Productivity” section: how the authors test the significance of each model specifications. Any statistical test has been used to select the best model fit. This point is not clear.
10. L522-L526: the diversification of water use is accounted for to determine the water productivity coefficient. I understand that the water could be used for different crops at farm level. There are no information regarding this point.
11. L556: Finally, what do (ATE) (ATT) mean? These abbreviations are not previously defined in the text and should be defined at the first time.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

 

Dear Authors,

Thank you for considering my comments and suggestions which have been addressed and clarified throughout the manuscript as well as the author response letter. For future submission, I recommend the authors to present the revised paper only with final changes, it is not necessary to show also information deleted from the manuscript. It was a little bit hard to complete the revision.

Best regards