Similar to other developing countries, diarrhea in the Philippines continues to be among the top causes of child mortality and morbidity. In pursuit of its Millennium Development Goals, the Philippine government commits to reduce child deaths and provide water and sanitation services to more rural households by 2015. Applying propensity score matching on the 1993, 1998, 2003, and 2008 rounds of the National Demographic and Health Survey to estimate the average treatment effect on the treated, it is found that the incidence of diarrhea among under-5 children is lower by as much as 4.5% in households with access to piped water and 10% in those with their own flush toilets, relative to comparable households. These findings underscore the need to ensure the quality of drinking water from the pipe or from other improved sources at the point of use, and the provision of improved and own sanitation facilities.

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A crucial step in measuring the resilience of railway infrastructure is to quantify the extent of its vulnerability to natural hazards. In this paper, we analyze the vulnerability of the German railway network to four types of natural hazards that regularly cause disruptions in German rail operations: floods, mass movements, slope fires, and tree falls. Using daily train traffic data matched with various data on disruptive events, we quantify the extent to which these four types of natural hazard reduce daily train traffic volumes. With a negative binomial count data regression, we find evidence that the track segments of the German railway network are most vulnerable to floods, followed by mass movements and tree-fall events. On average, floods reduce traffic on track segments by 19% of the average daily train traffic, mass movements by 16%, and tree fall by 4%. Moreover, when more than one type of natural hazard affects the track segment on the same day, train traffic on that segment falls by 34% of the average train traffic. Slope fires have an ambiguous and nonrobust effect on train traffic due to the reverse causality due to its triggering factors. This is the first study that attempts to rank different natural hazards according to their impact on railway traffic. The results have implications for the selection of resilience strategy and can help prioritize policy measures.