The People’s Voice and Access to Sanitation

John Nana Darko Francois, Kwabena Gyimah-Brempong, Johnson Kakeu and Christelle Signo Kouame

No 10430, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper estimates the effect of voice and accountability, which captures transparent electoral processes, free media, and freedom of expression, on access to sanitation services in developing countries. The core argument is that voice and accountability increases the visibility of sanitation as a public good and raises awareness of its benefits; hence, increasing its supply and demand. The analysis utilizes data from 73 developing countries and an instrumental variable approach to identify the causal effect of voice and accountability on access to, and use of, sanitation. The paper also employs a novel instrument-free estimator as both an alternative estimator for the analysis and an empirical strategy to formally assess the validity of the instrument in a just-identified model—a previously untestable just-identifying exclusion restriction. The paper finds robust evidence that voice and accountability increase access to sanitation and help close the persistent rural-urban inequality in access to sanitation. The results suggest that key tenets of democracy such a freedom of speech, free media, and power of electoral incentives are not a luxury of the rich—they are relevant to the world’s poor as they can shape the demand and distribution of sanitation services.

Date: 2023-05-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/09944320 ... 334070641ae4a9ab.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:wbk:wbrwps:10430

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().