Determinants of Domestic Water Use by Rural Households Without Access to Private Improved Water Sources in Benin: A Seemingly Unrelated Tobit Approach

Aminou Arouna () and Stephan Dabbert

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2010, vol. 24, issue 7, 1398 pages

Abstract: This paper analyzes the determinants of domestic water use in rural areas. The focus is on households without access to private improved water sources. These households use either only free sources, only purchased sources or a combination of free and purchased sources. We also analyze households’ water use behaviors as a function of water availability by explicitly estimating domestic water use for both rainy and dry seasons. Using a Seemingly Unrelated Tobit approach to simultaneously account for the censored nature of water demand and the correlation of error terms between free and purchased water use equations, we find that purchased water demand is perfectly price inelastic due to water scarcity. The important determinants of water use are household size and composition, access to water sources, wealth and time required for fetching water. Nevertheless, the effects of these determinants vary between household types and seasons, and the policy implications of the findings are discussed. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Keywords: Domestic water management; Rural households; Seemingly unrelated tobit; Benin (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11269-009-9504-4 (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:spr:waterr:v:24:y:2010:i:7:p:1381-1398

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-009-9504-4

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().