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The Price of Purity: Willingness to pay for air and water purification technologies in Rajasthan, India
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Abstract
Diarrheal illnesses and acute respiratory infections are among the top causes for
premature death and disability across the developing world, and adoption of various
technologies for avoiding these illnesses remains extremely low. We exploit data from
a unique contingent valuation experiment to consider whether households in rural Rajasthan
are unwilling to make investments in "domain-specific" environmental health technologies
when faced with health risks in multiple domains. Results indicate that demand for
water-related risk reductions is higher on average than demand for air-related risk
reduction. In addition, households' private health benefits from mitigating diarrheal
(respiratory) disease risks are higher (no different) when community-level air pollution
risks, rather than community-level water pollution risks, have previously been mitigated.
This asymmetric response cannot fully be explained by survey order effects or embedding,
but rather suggests that that the broader health environment and the salience of particular
risks may be important in households' decision to adopt environmental health technologies.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17419Collections
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Marc A. Jeuland
Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy
Marc Jeuland is a Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy, with a joint appointment
in the Duke Global Health Institute. His research interests include nonmarket valuation,
water and sanitation, environmental health, energy poverty and transitions, trans-boundary
water resource planning and management, and the impacts and economics of climate change. Jeuland's
recent research includes work to understand the economic implications of climate change
for water resources
Subhrendu K. Pattanayak
Oak Foundation Distinguished Professor of Environmental and Energy Policy
Subhrendu K. Pattanayak is the Oak Professor of Environmental and Energy Policy at
Duke University. He studies the causes and consequences of human behaviors related
to the natural environment to help design and evaluate policy interventions in low-income
tropical countries. His research is in three domains at the intersection of environment,
development, health and energy: forest ecosystem services, environmental health (diarrhea,
malaria, respiratory infections) and household energy transition
Faraz Usmani
Research Assistant, Ph D Student
I am an applied microeconomist, with research interests at the intersection of environmental,
energy and development economics. In addition to being a PhD candidate at Duke University, I
am a Doctoral Student Fellow at the Duke University Energy Initiative, and a Doctoral
Scholar</a
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