Coping with unreliable public water supplies: Averting expenditures by households in Kathmandu, Nepal

This paper investigates two complementary pieces of data on households’ demand forimproved water services, coping costs and willingness to pay (WTP), from a survey of1500 randomly sampled households in Kathmandu, Nepal. We evaluate how coping costsand WTP vary across types of water users and income. We find that households inKathmandu Valley engage in five main types of coping behaviors: collecting, pumping,treating, storing, and purchasing. These activities impose coping costs on an averagehousehold of as much as 3 U.S. dollars per month or about 1% of current incomes,representing hidden but real costs of poor infrastructure service. We find that thesecoping costs are almost twice as much as the current monthly bills paid to the water utilitybut are significantly lower than estimates of WTP for improved services. We findthat coping costs are statistically correlated with WTP and several householdcharacteristics.

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