The award-winning paper by Fuente et al. (2016) is a product of collaboration between EfD and Nairobi City Water and Sewer Company. It uses data on household socioeconomic status and metered water use in order to evaluate the distributional incidence of subsidies delivered through the water tariff in Nairobi. Their findings reveal that high-income residential customers and non-residential customers received a disproportional share of subsidies, suggesting that the increasing block tariff (IBT) implemented in Nairobi was not effectively targeting subsidies to low-income households. Furthermore, they found that stated expenditure on water is a poor proxy for meter water use and that using this proxy will underestimate the size of the subsidy delivered through the tariff. These findings have implication for both the design and evaluation of water tariffs in developing countries.
Water Resource Research (WRR) is a peer-reviewed journal that is published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU). It covers topics within social and natural sciences of water, and had an impact factor of 4.397 in 2016 according to Journal Citation Reports.
The Editor’s choice award from WRR has been given out yearly since 2011. It is awarded to approximately 1% of published papers in a calendar year to provide professional recognition to scientists and students for outstanding work. The selection is done by the editors of WRR based on technical significance, novelty, originality, presentation, and broader implications of the paper. The award is received in the year following a publication.
The WRR Editor’s Choice Award for papers published in 2016 was announced at the AGU annual conference in December 2017. Fuente et al. (2016) was the only paper awarded within the field of policy/economics in this year.
Click here to read the award winner article.