Sanitation, financial incentives and health spillovers: A cluster randomised trial

Lisa Cameron, Paulo Santos, Milan Thomas and Jeff Albert

Journal of Health Economics, 2021, vol. 77, issue C

Abstract: Poor sanitation and its consequent negative health outcomes continue to plague the developing world. Drawing on the finding that financial subsidies have changed behaviour in other health contexts, we conducted a clustered randomised trial in 160 villages in Lao PDR to evaluate the effectiveness of combining financial incentives with Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), a widely-conducted behaviour change program. Villages were randomly allocated to four groups, all of which received CLTS but differed in the type of subsidy offered (none, household, village or both). Using data from a random sample of households with young children and village administrative data, we show that household incentives increased sanitation take-up among the poor, whereas a village incentive increased take-up primarily among the non-poor. Improved sanitation produced positive health spillovers - a 10 percentage point increase in village sanitation coverage decreased the probability of childhood stunting by 3 percentage points.

Keywords: Sanitation; WASH; Health behaviour; Financial incentives; Height; Stunting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I15 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629621000412
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:jhecon:v:77:y:2021:i:c:s0167629621000412

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2021.102456

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

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