Small Farms, Externalities, and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s
By Zeynep K. Hansen, G. Libecap. Journal of Political Economy, 2004
181 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We provide a new and more complete analysis of the origins of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, one of the most severe environmental crises in North America in the twentieth century. Severe drought and wind erosion hit the Great Plains in 1930 and lasted through 1940. There were similar droughts in the 1950s and 1970s, but no comparable level of wind erosion. We explain why. The prevalence of small farms in the 1930s limited private solutions for controlling the downwind externalities associated with wind erosion. Drifting sand from unprotected fields damaged neighboring farms. Small farmers cultivated more of their land and were less likely to invest in erosion control than larger farmers. Soil conservation districts, established by the government after 1937, helped coordinate erosion control. This “unitized” solution for collective action is similar to that used in other natural resource/environmental settings.
Subfields: Earth-Surface Processes
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8bcf24497985e49148f5133ca6da33e9509c9a42
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Citations in the corpus
- The impact of New Deal expenditures on mobility during the Great Depression (2006, background): “‘‘Dust Bowl’’ counties were obtained from Hansen and Libecap (2004).”
- Individual and Cooperative Management of Invasive Species in Human-mediated Landscapes (2014, unknown): “The administration then turned to facilitating, with carrots and sticks, soil conservation districts that induced cooperation over a wider scale (Hansen and Libecap 2004).”
- Adaptation and the poor: development, resilience and transition (2008, background): “As shown in Table 1, interventions occurred at different levels and in all domains: economic, social, political, legal, infrastructure and scientific (see Hansen and Libecap, 2004).”