Choosing Among Pro-Poor Policy Options in the Delivery of Municipal Water Services

Joseph Cook, David Fuente and Dale Whittington
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Joseph Cook: School of Economic Sciences, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164, United States
David Fuente: #x2020;School of Earth, Ocean and Environment, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, United States
Dale Whittington: #x2021;Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering and Department of City and Regional Planning University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27156, United States§Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom

Water Economics and Policy (WEP), 2020, vol. 06, issue 03, 1-21

Abstract: The poor are most likely to suffer from a service provider that cannot reliably supply high-quality water through the piped network. Effectively assisting the poor is a key component of a successful tariff reform process. This paper provides practical, up-to-date advice that water utilities, municipalities, central governments, and donors can use to design and implement pro-poor policies for municipal water supply in low- and middle-income countries. After mapping contextual factors for a given situation and outlining the set of pro-poor policy alternatives, we use a simplified typology to diagnose common types of situations a water provider might be facing, provide policy recommendations, highlight potential policy mistakes, and discuss the challenges that policymakers are likely to face.

Keywords: Customer assistance programs; subsidies; subsidy targeting; connection subsidies; “service-level” targeting; small-scale independent providers; water vendors; increasing block tariffs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1142/S2382624X19500139

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