In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Fiona Burlig, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, about improving access to clean drinking water in India. In partnership with a private company that cleans drinking water and delivers water directly to households, Burlig recently conducted a field experiment to find out how different pricing strategies and subsidies influence people’s willingness to pay for clean drinking water; she and her colleagues gauged the effectiveness of these strategies by monitoring health outcomes for households that had varying levels of access to clean water. Burlig discusses the design and findings of her study, what these findings reveal about how people value clean water, and the involvement of both the public and private sectors in expanding access to clean water in developing nations.

References and recommendations:

“The Value of Clean Water: Experimental Evidence from Rural India” by Fiona Burlig, Amir Jina, and Anant Sudarshan; https://www.nber.org/papers/w33557

“Development Impact” blog from the World Bank; https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/impactevaluations

Valuing Access to Clean Drinking Water in India, with Fiona Burlig

Resources Radio is a weekly podcast by Resources for the Future. Each week we talk to leading experts about climate change, electricity, ecosystems, and more, making the latest research accessible to everyone.