Water Demand and the Welfare Effects of Connection: Empirical Evidence from Cambodia

Marcello Basani, Barry Reilly and Jonathan Isham ()

Middlebury College Working Paper Series from Middlebury College, Department of Economics

Abstract: Using cross-sectional household-level data from seven provincial Cambodian towns, we estimate a water demand equation for households connected to the network, and provide an empirical measurement of the economic value of tap water connection. The use of a two-step econometric procedure allows us to analyse issues relating to household access to water and to the volume of household water consumption. We estimate that the connection elasticity with respect to the one-off initial cost of connection is -0.39; the price elasticity of water demand for the connected households lies in a range between -0.4 and -0.5; and the welfare effects of water connection are approximately 17 percent of the actual expenditure of the poor unconnected households. Furthermore, providing a network connection to all households in the sample would have the distributional consequences of decreasing the estimated Gini coefficient by three percentage points and the poverty head-count ratio by six percentage points.

Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2004-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.middlebury.edu/services/econ/repec/mdl/ancoec/0429.pdf (application/pdf)

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:mdl:mdlpap:0429

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Middlebury College Working Paper Series from Middlebury College, Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vijaya Wunnava ().