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"WATER UTILITIES"
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Africa's water and sanitation infrastructure : access, affordability, and alternatives
The Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD) has produced continent-wide analysis of many aspects of Africa's infrastructure challenge. The main findings were synthesized in a flagship report titled Africa's Infrastructure: a time for transformation, published in November 2009. Meant for policy makers, that report necessarily focused on the high-level conclusions. It attracted widespread media coverage feeding directly into discussions at the 2009 African Union Commission Heads of State Summit on Infrastructure. Although the flagship report served a valuable role in highlighting the main findings of the project, it could not do full justice to the richness of the data collected and technical analysis undertaken. There was clearly a need to make this more detailed material available to a wider audience of infrastructure practitioners. Hence the idea of producing four technical monographs, such as this one, to provide detailed results on each of the major infrastructure sectors, information and communication technologies (ICT), power, transport, and water, as companions to the flagship report. These technical volumes are intended as reference books on each of the infrastructure sectors. They cover all aspects of the AICD project relevant to each sector, including sector performance, gaps in financing and efficiency, and estimates of the need for additional spending on investment, operations, and maintenance. Each volume also comes with a detailed data appendix, providing easy access to all the relevant infrastructure indicators at the country level, which is a resource in and of itself.
eBook
Class, Race, Ethnicity, and Justice in Safe Drinking Water Compliance
Objective Past research yields inconsistent evidence of disparities in environmental quality by socioeconomic status (SES), race, and/or ethnicity. Since the political significance of race/ethnicity may be contingent upon SES, this study advances environmental justice research by examining interactively the effects of race, ethnicity, and SES on environmental quality. Methods We match 2010–2013 Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) compliance records with demographic and economic data for U.S. local government water utilities serving populations greater than 1,000. Statistical regression isolates direct and interactive relationships between communities’ racial/ethnic populations, SES, and SDWA compliance. Results We find that community racial/ethnic composition predicts drinking water quality, but also that SES conditions the effect; specifically, black and Hispanic populations most strongly predict SDWA violations in low‐SES communities. Conclusions Our findings highlight the importance of analyzing race, ethnicity, and SES interactively in environmental justice research. Results also carry troubling implications for drinking water quality in the United States.
Journal Article
The pros and cons of wave power
Discusses the pros and cons of using wave power to provide energy we need.
Book
Assessing environmentally sensitive productivity growth: incorporating externalities and heterogeneity into water sector evaluations
The drinking water and wastewater services often involve heterogenous production environments and considerable negative externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions. Conventional productivity measurements do not factor in either of these issues. This paper analyses the environmentally sensitive productivity change in the Australian drinking water sector whilst including greenhouse gas emissions and group heterogeneities simultaneously. It uses a smooth bootstrap metafrontier Malmquist-Luenberger production frontier framework to decompose the productivity change into efficiency change, best practice frontier change, and technical gap ratio change for 2006 to 2015 using utility-level data. The method circumvents the limitations of convexification strategy when determining the intertemporal and global directional distance functions. The findings indicate that the environmentally sensitive productivity of the Australian drinking water sector has improved for the overall study period but declined in the periods of 2006/07 to 2008/09, 2010/11 and 2012/13. The large utilities have made the most improvement in closing the gap between the within-group and global frontiers.
Journal Article
Social Comparisons, Household Water Use, and Participation in Utility Conservation Programs: Evidence from Three Randomized Trials
Regulation and political opposition often force water utilities to rely on nonprice approaches to manage water demand. Using randomized field experiments in three different water utilities, we assess the effectiveness of social comparisons to reduce demand and analyze their interaction with existing conservation programs. In two utilities, the program decreases consumption by 5%, with significant heterogeneity across the distribution of baseline water use. We do not detect a statistically significant average treatment effect in the third utility. Social norms do not appear to crowd out existing conservation programs: treated households are more likely to participate in additional programs. Of the two utilities with significant treatment effects, higher participation rates in conservation programs account for a very small fraction of water savings (3%) in one utility and a modest fraction (9%–25%) in the second. We discuss evidence that social norms may induce participation among the specific type of consumers that utilities wish to target.
Journal Article
Price and Consumption Misperception Profiles: The Role of Information in the Residential Water Sector
Consumer misperceptions about key economic variables, such as price or consumption, often hinder the effectiveness of natural resources management policies. When facing increasing block rates, water users might fail to identify the marginal price of their water use and guide themselves by information from their past total bill and water use amounts. However, this information might not be correctly perceived or remembered. By comparing them with actual bimonthly billing data from 1465 households in Granada (Spain), we study the inaccuracy of the users’ recollections during an in-person survey that also asked them about their characteristics, environmental and conservation habits, and exposure to informational policies. A conditional mixed-process selection model is used to test the hypothesis that the degree of inaccuracy in the recollection of past water bill and consumption amounts is related to indicators of the costs and benefits of acquiring the relevant information. Then, a latent class model exploits unobserved household heterogeneity to sort households into two classes—based on whether and how accurately they recalled past bill and consumption amounts—and to estimate the probability of belonging to each class, based on observable characteristics. We derive policy recommendations and show that knowledge of consumption and bill size is rather poor but that informational policies could improve consumer knowledge and the effectiveness of pricing policies. Finally, we identify which informational policies might be most effective and what type of consumers are most likely to respond to such policies.
Journal Article