Spring Cleaning: Rural Water Impacts, Valuation, and Property Rights Institutions*

The brief summarizes the spring cleaning: rural water impacts, valuation, and property rights institutions. The first two rounds of spring protection occurred in January-April 2005 and August-November 2005. The author measure health impacts of spring protection, an investment that improves source water quality. The author also estimate households' valuation of spring protection and simulate the welfare impacts of alternatives to the current system of common property rights in water, which limits incentives for private investment. Spring infrastructure investments reduce fecal contamination by 66 percent, but household water quality improves less, due to recontamination. Child diarrhea falls by one quarter. Travel-cost based revealed preference estimates of households' valuations are much smaller than both stated preference valuations and health planners' valuations, and are consistent with models in which the demand for health is highly income elastic. The author estimate that private property norms would generate little additional investment while imposing large static costs due to above-marginal-cost pricing, private property will function better at higher income levels or underwater scarcity, and alternative institutions could yield Pareto improvements.