Evidence on designing sanitation interventions | Institute for Fiscal Studies (2025)

Journal of Development Economics

Published on 1 October 2024

We discuss the new findings on sanitation provision from the 12 papers in this special issue.

  • Health and social care
  • International development
  • Sanitation

Sanitation is a public good, the responsibility for which is shared between households and the government. Interventions in the sector, therefore, must be designed with an eye toward reducing crowd out. We discuss the new findings on sanitation provision from the 12 papers in this special issue in the context of a simple model of household choice of levels of sanitation investment in the face of joint responsibility between the government and households over sanitation. The model provides micro-foundations for understanding when we should be particularly concerned about the potential for crowd-out together with intuition for the implications of the choice of intervention design between information, in-kind transfers, cash transfers, and subsidies. We use the framework of the model to discuss the findings of the papers in this special issue.

    Journal article details

    DOI
    10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103316
    Publisher
    Elsevier
    Issue
    Volume 171, October 2024

    Grant

    ESRC Institute for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy

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