What are the factors impeding or enhancing cooperative behavior amongst farmers in Chinese irrigation district maintenance? This paper argues that economic inducement mechanisms can enhance farmers' cooperative behavior in ID management, especially under the background of being lack of self-organization. The Nash equilibrium solution of cooperative behavior amongst farmers is derived. Given the amount of other farmers' maintenance effort, the factors influencing farmer i's cooperative behavior are classified into two groups-endogenous factors and exogenous factors. The endogenous factors are expected income achieved from irrigated agriculture and geographical location along an irrigation canal. The exogenous factors are the importance of the consumption of private goods relative to the use of the irrigation infrastructure, collective goods, and the price of collective goods. The influence of each factor is analyzed. Economic inducement mechanisms are shown to be crucial for the emergence of cooperative behavior amongst farmers in an ID. Dividing farmers within an ID into different water user associations can help to overcome strategic behavior in ID management, providing technical support, establishing compensation mechanisms and establishing land-transferring mechanisms can induce more maintenance effort.

Although China has reduced its poor population from 250 million in 1978 to 30 million in 2003, an overall reduction in world poverty still depends on progress being made in China because of its huge population. The concentration of poor in western rural regions makes China s task of poverty alleviation complex. Clearer and more transparent analyses on the reasons for poverty are essential prerequisites of any development policy that puts poverty reduction at its heart. The purpose of this paper is to identify causes for being poor in western rural China. It argues that the essence of rural income poverty in the western region is water poverty. Low efficiency of agricultural productivity resulting from poor land quality and uneven distribution of water resources has led to heavy dependence on irrigated agriculture. Irrigated agriculture has played and will play a critical role in creating employment opportunities and alleviating poverty. Existing water shortages and competition for different water utilization make it imperative to enhance the efficiency of water resource management.