Effect analysis of government intervention on scale-heterogeneous farmers’ behavior of groundwater exploitation

Abstract

Government intervention has become an important measure to restrain groundwater overexploitation. This paper analyzes the effect of three types of government intervention measures, namely, guidance, incentive and constraint, on farmers’ groundwater utilization behavior, from the perspective of scale-heterogeneity, using general quantile regression model, by survey data of 1122 households in well irrigation area of north China. The results showed that: (1) the incentive and guiding measures have negative effects on farmers’ groundwater usage, while the effect of restrictive measures is not obvious. The guided policy is superior to the incentive measure as to governance effect. (2) With the increase of farmers’ land scale, the influence of incentive measures shows a trend of weakening, and the effect of guided measures on groundwater demand reduction of farmers is stronger. When it comes to the different point of water consumption, when at the point level of 0.25, the incentive measures have the most obvious inhibitory effect. With the increase of water consumption of farmers, the guided measures begin to play a core role. The effect of restrictive measures is not obvious with the increase of water consumption. (3) In addition, farmers’ irrigation water consumption also is affected by gender, cognition of water resources shortage, ecological cognitive level, acquisition ability of disaster information, village rain conditions, the degree of water rights market development, feelings of water fee increase, irrigated disputes in the village, collective economic level of village. The selection of policy tools is flexible according to the farmers’ land scale for groundwater over-extraction control.