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Does Piped Water Improve Happiness? A Case from Asian Rural Communities

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Abstract

This study explores whether piped water connection improves people’s happiness. To answer this question, the survey on rural households’ piped water connection situation along with happiness questions was conducted in the rural areas of Cambodia, China, and the Philippines. In these countries, it is common to find areas where some households have access to piped water system while similar households in the same vicinity do not. This allows us to directly test the impact of piped water connection on happiness. The findings of this study firmly suggest that piped water generally increase happiness mainly through convenience and time saving. These benefits are more pronounced in areas with no close substitutes for the connection. Using instrumental ordered probit model to account for endogeneity of the household income variable in the happiness equation, this study estimates the value of piped water connection to be about 30% of annual household income. This study also found that recent experiences, especially bad one, would influence reported global happiness. This finding is consistent with many studies in behavioral economics, which found that people give more attention to changes occurring in loss domain than those occurring in domain of gain. Variables that capture impacts of recent experiences would therefore be necessary in the happiness equation to avoid omitted variables bias.

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Notes

  1. Another measure of happiness is based on –moment-to-moment impacts of activities and their durations. Popular methods used to capture happiness in this dimension are the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) and the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) (Kahneman et al. 2004; Kahneman and Thaler 2006).

  2. Including these two formats of happiness questions in different places of the questionnaires also allows us to test consistency of answers provided by respondents when the same happiness questions are placed in the different areas of questionnaire. However, the result of this test is not reported in the paper.

  3. There are three choices in this question; recently experience happy event, recently experience sad event, and no experience of such events occur.

  4. We also check the reliability of the questionnaire used in each country. The Cronbach' s Alpha of China, Cambodia, and the Philippines questionnaires are 0.817, 0.941, and 0.877, respectively. In addition, ANOVA is also performed to check whether there is different pattern of answer to happiness questions among countries, and the result suggests there is none at 5% significant level.

  5. To compensate them for their time and effort, participants were awarded gift certificates worth about 7 US dollar in local currency for joining the activity.

  6. Since the questionnaire contains two types of subjective well-being questions, there are two subjective well-being models to be estimated. The first model uses the subjective well-being score reported from 1–5 scale, while another model uses the subjective well-being score reported from 0–10 scale.

  7. There is no universal acceptation what types of scales would be used for happiness questions. However, some studies suggested that scales with higher discriminating power may be preferred to those with lower discriminating power (Bouazzaoui and Mullet 2002; Kristoffersen 2010).

  8. We took three random samples each of water that had not received any further treatment from households with and without private water connections. All samples taken from the tap of connected households in Jingzhou, Cebu and Phnom Penh passed the corresponding national standards for total coliform—a standard test of microbial contamination.

  9. A few connected households report time spend for collecting water mostly during the dry season when there is shortage of water supply for water distribution system.

  10. For more details of discussion about this issue, please see Mahasuweerachai (2015).

  11. This situation can also be found in the study of Oswald and Powdthavee (2008) and Powdthavee and Van den Berg (2011), which the income coefficients significant varied across the model specifications resulting in variation of estimated monetary values.

  12. We also test this with household income variable and number of year with piped water connection variable. The estimated results reveal that they do not statistically vary with country specific.

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Acknowledgements

This work was carried out with the aid of grants from the Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia (EEPSEA) of WorldFish and E-San Center for Business and Economic Research (ECBER). We thank Dale Whittington, Jack Knetsch, and Vic Adamowicz for their helpful comments. We also thank Vin Spoann, Chou Phanith, San Vibol, Jin Jianjun, Ma Hua, Jamil Paolo Francisco, and Piyaluk Buddhawongsa of surveys in Phnom Penh, Jingzhou, Cebu and Chiang Mai for the dedication they showed and their outstanding fieldwork.

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  1. Faculty of Economics, Khon Kaen University, Khon Kaen, Thailand

    Phumsith Mahasuweerachai & Siwarut Pangjai

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  1. Phumsith Mahasuweerachai
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Correspondence to Phumsith Mahasuweerachai.

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Mahasuweerachai, P., Pangjai, S. Does Piped Water Improve Happiness? A Case from Asian Rural Communities. J Happiness Stud 19, 1329–1346 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-017-9875-9

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