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Willingness to pay for reliable piped water services: evidence from urban Ghana

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Abstract

The primary objective of this research is to estimate the willingness to pay in Ghana for reliable piped water services. Three competing economic valuation approaches are used to do this: the contingent valuation method (CVM), the hedonic pricing method (HPM) and the travel cost method (TCM). These methods allow for easy robustness tests of the estimates and serves as an improvement on previous research. Using survey data from a sample of 1,650 urban households, we obtain estimates of the willingness of households to pay every month for urban piped water services of: GHS 47.80 or US$15.25 (CVM), GHS 44.73 or US$14.27 (HPM) and GHS 22.72 or US$725 (TCM). Such sums account for 3–8% of household income. These empirical calculations are then used to inform policy choices by determining the economic viability of the participation of the private sector in the water sector in Ghana.

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Notes

  1. UNICEF/WHO (2012) “Millennium Development Goal drinking water target met.” Available at: https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2012/drinking_water_20120306/en/.

  2. The term “unplanned settlement” refers to any uncoordinated settlement on land without reference to any predetermined standards of planning.

  3. Ghana Statistical Service (GSS 2012)2010 Population and Housing Census, pg. 30.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Chief Editor and the Co-Editor for handling the work with tolerance and professionalism. The constructive comments from the anonymous reviewers are very much appreciated. Again, a million thanks for all comments received at the 2015 EAERE Conference, and the seminar series of the School of Economics, University of East Anglia, UK. A special thanks to the Environment for Development (EFD) for their motivation and kind support. Lastly, we thank Rexford Kwaku Asiama, Jerry Seddor and Villy Asare for proofreading the initial draft.

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  1. School of Sustainable Development (SSD), University of Environment and Sustainable Development (UESD), Somanya, Ghana

    Anthony Amoah

  2. School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

    Peter G. Moffatt

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  1. Anthony Amoah
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Correspondence to Anthony Amoah.

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Appendix

Appendix

1.1 Descriptive statistics for HPM TCM and CVM

See Tables 10 and 11.

Table 10 Descriptive statistics for HPM
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Table 11 Descriptive statistics of TCM and CVM
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Amoah, A., Moffatt, P.G. Willingness to pay for reliable piped water services: evidence from urban Ghana. Environ Econ Policy Stud 23, 805–829 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10018-021-00303-z

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