Water pollution is becoming an increasing threat to China's sustainable development. To respond to this challenge, China has pledged to cut emissions of two major water pollutants, chemical oxygen demand (COD) and ammonia nitrogen (NH4), and has disaggregated the national target among provinces. However, the abatement potential and costs have not been thoroughly assessed. This paper aims to examine the reduction potential and associated costs of COD and NH4 in the Chinese industrial sector.

Despite its importance in benefit-cost analyses in the water supply, transportation, and health care sectors, there are relatively few empirical estimates of the value of travel time savings (VTT) in low-income countries, particularly in rural areas. Analysts instead often rely on a textbook “rule of thumb” of valuing time at 50% of prevailing unskilled wage rates, though these benchmarks have little empirical support in these settings. We estimate the value of travel time through the use of a repeated discrete choice stated preference exercise.

As the disease burden of poor access to water and sanitation declines around the world, the non-health benefits – mainly the time burden of water collection – will likely grow in importance in sector funding decisions and investment analyses. We measure the coping costs incurred by households in one area of rural Kenya. Sixty percent of the 387 households interviewed were collecting water outside the home, and household members were spending an average of two to three hours doing so per day.

The increasing block tariff (IBT) is among the most widely used tariffs by water utilities, particularly in developing countries. This is due in part to the perception that the IBT can effectively target subsidies to low-income households. Combining data on households' socioeconomic status and metered water use, this paper examines the distributional incidence of subsidies delivered through the IBT in Nairobi, Kenya.

This paper investigates direct and spillover effects of a social information campaign aimed at encouraging residential water savings in Colombia. The campaign was organized as a randomized field experiment, consisting of monthly delivery of consumption reports, including normative messages, for one year. Results indicate that social information and appeals to norm-based behavior reduce water use by up to 6.8 percent in households directly targeted by the campaign.