Political determinants of investment in water and sanitation: Evidence from Brazilian elections

Evan Kresch and Rodrigo Schneider

Economics Letters, 2020, vol. 189, issue C

Abstract: This paper studies the extent to which political determinants play a role in the investment decisions for water and sanitation (WS) services. We focus on the political alignment between local and state officials using the outcomes of close mayoral elections in Brazil. We find that mayors of municipalities with self-run WS companies aligned with the state governor significantly decreased investment in their WS systems compared to unaligned mayors, providing evidence that politics plays a role in the running of public utilities.

Keywords: Water & sanitation; Public utilities; Development; Federalism; Elections; Regression discontinuity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H73 L95 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176520300586
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:189:y:2020:i:c:s0165176520300586

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2020.109041

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().