An Economic Study of The Wadi Rehabilitation Impact on The Society’s Welfare in Matrouh Governorate (Case Study- Kharouba Wadi)

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the impact of Wadi Kharouba rehabilitation on the society’s welfare through: (1) econometric estimation of the impact of the Wadi’ add-value and households ’demographic variables on per capita expenditure per month as a proxy variable of beneficiaries ‘welfare; and (2) identifying the preference between individual welfare indicators and collective welfare indicators from farmers and society’ points of views. A census of the Agarma tribe households benefited from Wadi rehabilitation is surveyed by in-depth interview questionnaire in July, 2022. Two-Stages Least SquareInstrumental Variable (2SLS-IV) technique is applied to overcome the endogeneity problem. The empirical results show that as the Wadi add -value increases by 1%, the per capita expenditure increase by 37.225%. Furthermore, demographic characteristics such as household head’ age, household size, education, and dependency ratio significantly influence the add value and then per capita expenditure variables. Another purposive sample of experts is surveyed to identify the preference between individual and collective welfare criteria and indicators of Wadi Kharouba. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) show that the highest preference is assigned to individual welfare criterion (53%) which indicates the priority of Bedouin’s economic outcomes in trade off collective welfare criterion of society and environment (47%).High priorities are given to three indicators: “farm income to total income” (32.1%), “add food and fodder production” (26.8%) and “abating of land common conflicts” (17.8%). The findings suggest that scaling up the rehabilitation activities, specifically irrigation facilities will enhance per capita expenditure, livelihood and household welfare in the marginalized Bedouin communities.