Fracking, farmers, and rural electrification in India
Senior Fellow T. Robert Fetter explores electrification’s role in structural change in a new Journal of Development Economics article.
Research co-authored by T. Robert Fetter on electrification’s role in structural change is published in the Journal of Development Economics.
In the article "Fracking, farmers, and rural electrification in India," Fetter, a senior fellow with the Duke Center for International Development, and Faraz Usmani, a research economist in the global unit at Mathematica, explored if rural electrification can drive structural change and, if so, which conditions deliver measurable economic benefits.
“The shale gas revolution in the United States induced an unprecedented commodity boom across northwestern India,” the authors wrote in the article’s abstract. “Leveraging population-based discontinuities in the contemporaneous roll-out of India’s national rural electrification scheme, we show that access to electricity increased total employment and non-agricultural employment in villages affected by this exogenous economic shock, but had no impact on labor markets elsewhere. This combination of two natural experiments highlights how complementary economic conditions drive heterogeneity in the labor-market impacts of rural electrification. It also helps explain the large variation in the reported impacts of such resource-intensive infrastructure investments globally."
Fetter, an economist whose research lies at the intersection of energy, environment and development, works with the Duke University Energy Access Project and collaborates with global practitioners and policy makers to advance opportunities to increase energy access and the use of low-carbon and sustainable energy sources.