Panacea (medicine)

Engineering

Ecology

Biology

Economic system

Sustainability

Literature

Energy poverty

Economics

Language change

Business

Alternative medicine

Renewable energy

International political economy

Politics

Political science

Hydropower

Political economy

Natural resource

Poverty

Energy security

Medicine

Economy

Economic growth

Natural resource economics

Hydroelectricity

Electricity

Resource curse

Electrical engineering

Pathology

Review of International Political Economy

Our study offers a comparative assessment of the economic, sociopolitical and environmental implications of the world's largest source of renewable electricity, hydropower. Theorists from many disciplines have questioned both the proper role and ostensible benefits from the generation of electricity from large-scale hydroelectric dams. In this study, we use 30 years of World Bank data from 1985 to 2014 and a research design with three mutually exclusive reference classes of countries: major hydropower producers, members of OPEC and all other countries. This is precisely so our analysis moves away from 'dam-centric' or single case study approaches to comparative analysis at the international scale. We examine and test six separate hypotheses related to (a) military conflict, (2) poverty, (3) economic growth, (4) public debt, (5) corruption and (6) greenhouse gas emissions.Our analysis lends statistical support to the idea that there is such a thing as a 'hydroelectric resource curse', although effects were not always significant and varied from small, medium to large. The possible benefits of hydroelectricity—improved energy access, economic development and positive spillover effects—are real, but they are all too frequently constrained. Planners, investors and researchers may therefore need to rethink their underlying assumptions about how they evaluate hydropower's risk.

Internationalizing the political economy of hydroelectricity: security, development and sustainability in hydropower states