Abstract
While public water utilities perform very well in many rich countries, the same, unfortunately, cannot be said of most developing countries, where poorly functioning water utilities are common. One of these is Egypt. After Cuba, the country has one of the lowest water tariffs in the world: The monthly residential water bill is less than 2 dollars per household. In Cairo, only half of the bills are actually collected. Revenues are far from adequate for covering the operating cost of utilities, let alone recovering investment costs. The government, while itself poor, still subsidizes water supply and sanitation to the tune of 2.5 billion dollars per year. This corresponds to 12 dollars per household per month, more than six times as much as water users pay.
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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Schiffler, M. (2015). Egypt: Kafka on the Nile. In: Water, Politics and Money. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16691-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16691-9_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16690-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16691-9
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