Spring Cleaning: Rural Water Impacts, Valuation and Property Rights Institutions

Abstract

In many societies, social norms create common property rights in natural resources, limiting incentives for private investment. This paper uses a randomized evaluation in Kenya to measure the health impacts of investments to improve source water quality through spring protection, estimate the value that households place on spring protection, and simulate the welfare impacts of alternative water property rights norms and institutions, including common property, freehold private property, and alternative "Lockean" property rights norms. We find that infrastructure investments reduce fecal contamination by 66% at naturally occurring springs, cutting child diarrhea by one quarter. While households increase their use of protected springs, travel-cost based revealed preference estimates of households' valuations are only one-half stated preference valuations and are much smaller than levels implied by health planners' typical valuations of child mortality, consistent with models in which the demand for health is highly income elastic. Simulations suggest that, at current income levels, private property norms would generate little additional investment while imposing large static costs due to spring owners' local market power, but that private property norms might function better than common property at higher income levels. Alternative institutions, such as "modified Lockean" property rights, government investment or vouchers for improved water, could yield higher social welfare.

Effectiveness and sustainability of water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions in combating diarrhoea

“…A third evaluation reported indirect evidence for contamination of piped water -the evaluation found at best an insignificant impact on diarrhoea morbidity for piped water supplied at source, noting that only one-quarter of households had reported boiling their water before drinking (Khanna 2008). In an evaluation of source water protection, Kremer et al (2009) find substantially higher pathogen content in household water compared to source water, arguing that the recontamination is 'due both to households' collection of water from multiple water sources and to partial recontamination of water in transport and storage' (p. 2). They suggest, however, that the reduced contamination by one-quarter in home water remained sufficient to account for the estimated 25 per cent reduction in child diarrhoea.…”

“…A number of studies comment on the issue of sustainability, but the extent to which studies include a formal evaluation of sustainability over time and in scale-up is limited. Our review identified only five follow-up evaluations conducted more than one year after the initial intervention had ended which assessed sustainability in reducing diarrhoea morbidity (Wilson and Chandler 1993, Hoque et al 1996, Brown et al 2007, deWilde et al 2008, Kremer et al 2009), in addition to one evaluation assessing compliance of two interventions six months and one year after they had ended ) and one assessing compliance four years later (Iijima et al 2001).…”

Socio-economic aspects of domestic groundwater consumption, vending and use in Kisumu, Kenya

“…There are some interventions that specifically target hand-dug wells and springs, most notably spring and well upgrading programmes (Kremer, Leino, Miguel, & Zwane, 2011;Philip & Stevens, 2013). Given the growing policy emphasis on reducing inequalities relating to water and sanitation, an important question is the extent to which such interventions can be considered pro-poor and how the incidence of benefits from well upgrading might vary across different socio-economic groups.…”

An endogenous growth model for the evolution of water rights systems

“…Second, an efficient rights trading arrangement may be immiserating if instituted at the wrong stage of a region's development. Kremer et al (2011), studying Kenyan water purification systems, found demand for clean water to be highly income elastic. Thus, at very low incomes, a commons structure-where few water sources were protected from contamination-appears to be utility maximizing; at higher income levels consumers would be better off under a market based water management scheme-where water is more expensive but safer.…”