This paper provides new evidence on how effectively piped water consumption subsidies are targeting poor households in 10 low- and middle-income countries around the world. The results suggest that, in these countries, existing tariff structures fall short of recovering the costs of service provision, and the resulting subsidies largely fail to achieve their goal of improving the accessibility and affordability of piped water for poor households. Instead, the majority of subsidies in all 10 countries are captured by the richest households. This is in part because the most vulnerable population segments typically face challenges in accessing and connecting to piped water services. The paper also reveals shortcomings in the design of the subsidies, which are conditional on poor households being connected to a piped network.
Authors

Research Fellow Institute for Fiscal Studies
Laura is a Research Fellow at IFS. Her current work focuses on tax and social protection policy and programme evaluation in developing countries.

Research Associate Royal Holloway, University of London
Juan is an IFS Research Associate and an Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Luis Alberto Andres

George Joseph

German Eduardo Sember

Michael David Thibert
Report details
- DOI
- 10.1920/re.ifs.2024.0506
- Publisher
- World Bank
Suggested citation
Abramovsky, L et al. (2020). Study of the Distributional Performance of Piped Water Consumption Subsidies in 10 Developing Countries. London: World Bank. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/study-distributional-performance-piped-water-consumption-subsidies-10-developing (accessed: 7 February 2025).
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