MIT | By: Peter Dizikes | GPE – August 16, 2017:
Study: People willing to pay more for running water report much higher levels of happiness when they have it.
Originally published January 14, 2013: If you’re reading this, odds are you’ve already used running water in your home today. But you’re in a minority: Globally, at least a billion people have no nearby source of water, while of the remaining six billion or so, only 42 percent have running water in their homes or a tap in the yard, according to the World Health Organization.
Now a new field experiment, co-authored by MIT economist Esther Duflo, shows just how much access to clean water matters to people. Residents of Morocco, the experiment demonstrates, are willing to take out loans and pay twice as much for water per month in order to have it piped into their homes. And despite the dent in their bottom-line finances, people in households that gain running water report significant improvements in well-being and happiness.
By linking more homes to existing water networks, “It seems we could improve people’s lives fairly easily,” says Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT.
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