To pay or not to pay? Water bill and delay in payment in Bejaia (Algeria): A duration analysis

Mourad Kertous and Sahad Zerzour

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Efficient water management does not only involve effective water treatment and delivery to customer but also efficient billing and payment system to ensure financial sustainability. Delays in water bills payment are recognized as a major problem in developing countries but the reasons explaining these situations are scarcely addressed in the literature. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to address this issue.This article addresses this topic with Algeria as a case study. In this context, we identified from a literature review the factors that could affect time to water bill payment and we analyzed the effect of these factors on the time to bill payments through a Kaplan Meyer survival estimates approach. We applied this approach to two datasets, one including 27,363 household subscribers of Algerienne Des Eaux Company (ADE-Bejaia) located in Bejaia city and a second one that we collected in August 2008 made of 172 subscribers. Our results show that price is an explanatory factor in payment delays. A 10% increase in the average price generates a 4.8% increase in the average time to payment. In addition to economic factors, users’ dissatisfaction about service quality is a key element in our model.

Keywords: Determinants; payment delays; water demand; Algeria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q21 Q25 Q5 Q56 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-11-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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