Inequalities in the access to water and sanitation services in the North and the Nordeste of Brazil: what lessons for social justice?

Alexandre Berthe

Cahiers du GREThA (2007-2019) from Groupe de Recherche en Economie Théorique et Appliquée (GREThA)

Abstract: Even if environmental issues are mostly studied as stakes for sustainability and future generations, the state of the environment, and more especially essential goods such as water and sanitation services, is a factor which influences the current well-being of individuals and is a central stake for environmental justice. However, the access to water and sanitation services is almost exclusively evaluated using the percentage of households with access to these services. From this observation, the objective of this paper is to present methods in order to evaluate the equity of the distribution of these services for households of two Brazilian regions: the North and the Nordeste. For that purpose, we build an indicator of access to water and sanitation services using the consumer expenditure survey realized in 2008/2009 by the IBGE and we measure the access inequalities using various inequality and concentration measurement tools. This paper shows that access inequalities are different from income inequalities, and for that reason, their evaluation is required for a better understanding of the social situation of households.

Keywords: Brazil; Water and Sanitation; Environmental inequalities; Social Justice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:grt:wpegrt:2016-07

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