The Price of Purity: Willingness to pay for air and water purification technologies in Rajasthan, India
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.
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Scholars@Duke
Subhrendu K. Pattanayak
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 transitions. He has focused on design of institutions and policies that are motivated by enormous inequities and a range of efficiency concerns (externalities, public goods and imperfect information and competition).
Dr. Pattanayak approaches these problems through systematic reviews of the literature (meta-analyses) and statistical modeling with high-resolution objective data collected in the field. He then uses those data to test hypotheses salient to policy manipulation, developed both from economic frameworks, stakeholder discussions and direct observations in the field. He employs empirical methods that exploit quasi-experimental variation (or experiments where feasible and appropriate), captured through household, community and institutional surveys. He typically matches these survey data with meso-scale secondary statistics and estimates econometric models to generate policy parameters. Dr. Pattanayak has collaborated closely with multi-lateral agencies, NGOs, governments, and local academics in Brazil, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the U.S.
Marc A. Jeuland
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 projects on transboundary river systems, a range of primary data collection projects related to analysis of adoption of environmental health improving technology, and analysis of the costs and benefits of environmental health interventions in developing countries. He has conducted multiple field experiments on issues such as: the role of water quality information in affecting household water and hygiene behaviors; the demand for, and impacts of cleaner cookstoves on household well-being; the long-term sustainability and effects of rural sanitation and water supply projects. He has also collected data on preferences for a range of environmental health improvements including cholera vaccines, household water treatment technologies and improved cookstoves. In the energy and development domain, he is currently working on several projects with the Energy Access Project at Duke, and is a co-founder of the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative (SETI), along with Professor Subhrendu Pattanayak and scholars from Chile, China and Ethiopia. His energy portfolio includes work related to evaluation of cleaner cooking interventions, measuring energy access and reliability, and reviews of the drivers and impacts literature related to energy.
Jeuland has worked in the past with the World Bank, USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, UNICEF, and many field-based NGOs and community-based implementing organizations.
Prior to his graduate studies and work with the World Bank, Jeuland was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa, where he designed and monitored construction of a pilot wastewater treatment system and trained management personnel at the plant’s managing firm.
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