Water affordability analysis: a critical literature review

Abstract

Water and sanitation affordability has drawn researchers’ attention over the past years due to the recent economic crisis and the growing role of tariffs on funding services. This paper conducted a systematic review of previous research on water and/or sanitation affordability and a critical qualitative discussion on the methodologies adopted. The research framework relied on a hybrid approach that combines systematic quantitative and narrative analyses. The literature review protocol applied returned 79 relevant studies published by journals and recognized international organizations and four key topics, namely affordability indicators, threshold, data source, and practical use of the analysis were identified and critically discussed. This paper contributes to the literature by presenting and discussing the most important water affordability issues and enlightening the potential role of the analysis in public financial policies.

Socio-Spatial Analysis of Water Affordability at Small Scales: A Needs-Based Approach

“…The literature on water poverty as an affordability problem in the Global North is extensive [11,18]. Many contributions focus on the United States where water poverty has grown worse in recent years as water prices have risen above the capacity to pay for lowincome households [6,13,[19][20][21].…”

A Comprehensive Framework for Water Affordability Analysis

“…Water affordability measures have varied among studies, relying most on the objectives of the analysis and data availability (Andres et al, 2020;Fagundes et al, 2023;Martins et al, 2016;WHO and UNICEF, 2021). In fact, measuring affordability can take a lot of work.…”

“…Moreover, families' revenue might vary during the year in places dominated by informal or agricultural work. Low-and middle-income countries do not perform regular socioeconomic surveys or censuses, and information is commonly spread among departments, government, and different stakeholders (Fagundes et al, 2023;OECD, 2020). Nevertheless, the most common analysis surrounds the impact of WSS expenditures on families' income.…”

“…There are several ways to calculate affordability in the literature, and differences in both numerator and denominator may change the results. A literature review on affordability measures found up to 15 ratios in the 79 studies analyzed (Fagundes et al, 2023). The authors claimed the main numerators were water bill, water expenditure, and water bill with volume for basic needs, representing 40.6%, 35.9%, and 18.8% of the studies, respectively, and denominators were income, total expenditure, and disposable income, representing 65.5%, 15.5%, and 17.2% of the studies, respectively.…”

“…To date, the suggestion has not been put into practice, and affordability analysis, if any, is still based on pre-established thresholds. The aforementioned literature review on WSS affordability revealed 90% of the studies adopted a threshold between 2 and 5% (Fagundes et al, 2023). The establishment of a limit for expenditure on WSS may be too inflexible for a sector with such a context, i.e., with scarce data, growing needs for investments, and interdependency with other sectors (Fagundes et al, 2023), and international organizations have started to suggest the use of "bands" rather than point estimates (WHO & UNICEF, 2021).…”