Nineteenth century London water supply: Processes of innovation and improvement

Nicola Tynan ()

The Review of Austrian Economics, 2013, vol. 26, issue 1, 73-91

Abstract: Public health concerns played a major role in driving the shift from private to government ownership of water works in Britain and the US. Poor water quality is one of the criticisms made of the eight water companies providing piped water to London during the nineteenth century. Critics argued that monopolistic water companies failed to invest in filtration, move their intake, increase capacity or expand their network until compelled to do so by regulation. Critics have taken a static view: looking at water and sanitation in London at a moment in time and identifying actions that the water companies could take that could improve water quality and, consequently, public health. Taking an Austrian process approach, however, shows that companies were continually investing to increase access to piped water and to improve water quality during a time of severe uncertainty and knowledge problems. Water companies often acted before the government to improve quality: early competition encouraged investment and innovation, while later government regulation followed entrepreneurs’ leads and imposed on all water companies improvements already implemented by some. Government decisions were responsible for much of the deterioration in water quality. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2013

Keywords: Water supply; Innovation; Market process; JEL Classification; B53; N93; L95 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11138-012-0182-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:revaec:v:26:y:2013:i:1:p:73-91

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11138/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11138-012-0182-8

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Austrian Economics is currently edited by Peter Boettke and Christopher Coyne

More articles in The Review of Austrian Economics from Springer, Society for the Development of Austrian Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().