Bailee Castillo

Approximately 59,071 man-made dams have been constructed worldwide to control flooding, provide electricity, supply water, improve navigation routes, farm animals, etc. There is an extensive list of dams that are planning on being built for rapid development. While the intention of these dams is positive, their installation has displaced between 40 and 80 million people worldwide. The purpose of this study is to determine if the overall economic health of an area improves or diminishes after a dam is constructed. To address this question, a dataset from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations which contains characteristics of every man-made dam that has been constructed across all countries was combined with a dataset from NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Application Centers which contains the GDP of every one degree of surface area of every continent. Initial regression results show that in Africa and Asia, the presence of a dam has a nonlinear impact on the surrounding area’s GDP; areas close to the dam are negatively impacted, however, past a certain distance that is specific to each continent, the dam’s presence has a positive impact on the area’s GDP.