Has Private Participation in Water and Sewerage Improved Coverage? Empirical Evidence from Latin America
By George R. G. Clarke, K. Kosec, Scott Wallsten. 2004
185 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Introducing private sector participation (PSP) into the water and sewerage sectors in developing countries is difficult and controversial. Empirical studies on its effects are scant and generally inconclusive. Case studies tend to find improvements in the sector following privatization, but they suffer from selection bias, and it is difficult to generalize from their results. To explore empirically the effects of PSP on coverage, we assemble a new dataset of connections to water and sewerage services at the city, and province level, based on household surveys in Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil. The household surveys, conducted over a number of years, allow us to compile data, before and after the introduction of PSP, as well as from similar (control) regions that never privatized at all. Our analysis reveals that, in general, connection rates to piped water and sewerage, improved following the introduction of PSP, consistent with the case study literature. We also find, however, that connection rates similarly improved in the control regions, suggesting that PSP, per se, may not have been responsible for those improvements. On the other hand, connection rates for the poorest households also tended to increase in the regions with PSP, and in the control regions, suggesting that-in terms of connections at least-PSP did not harm the poor.
Subfields: Nutrition and Dietetics, Strategy and Management, Urban Studies
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ce1b5a2ec5ad04242fd831e353b83bcef800136
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In Nutrition and Dietetics
In Strategy and Management
In Urban Studies
Citations in the corpus
- Urban water supply in India: status, reform options and possible lessons (2009, background): “12 See also the literature survey in Clarke et al. (2003) for more studies explicitly focused on the water sector. 13 See http://www.niph.go.jp/soshiki/suido/omn/eventsactivities/Hue2005/Huefile/NRWcontrol-ArakiPCI.pdf. 14 See D. S. Madhumathi in The Hindu Business Line, December 26, 2002 “Project t”
- Water for Life: The Impact of the Privatization of Water Services on Child Mortality (2004, unknown): “Aguas Argentinas increased fees for 17 percent of the customers through property reclassifications (Clarke et al. 2004).”
- The Economics of Managing Scarce Water Resources (2010, background): “…the share of households connected to piped water and sewerage increased in Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil, but similar improvements were observed in control regions where public management was retained, so the improvements cannot be causally attributed to privatization (Clarke et al. 2009).”