Evidence on designing sanitation interventions.

Sanitation is a public good, the responsibility for which is shared between households and the government. Interventions in the sector, therefore, must be designed with an eye toward reducing crowd out. We discuss the new findings on sanitation provision from the 12 papers in this special issue in the context of a simple model of household choice of levels of sanitation investment in the face of joint responsibility between the government and households over sanitation.

Privatization of public goods: Evidence from the sanitation sector in Senegal.

Privatization of a public good (the management of sewage treatment centers in Dakar, Senegal) leads to an increase in the productivity of downstream sewage dumping companies and a decrease in downstream prices of the services they provide to households. We use the universe of legal dumping of sanitation waste from May 2009 to May 2018 to show that legal dumping increased substantially following privatization-on average an increase of 74%, or an increase of about 1640 trips to treatment centers each month. This is due to increased productivity of all trucks, not just those associated with the company managing the privatized treatment centers.

Subsidies versus mental accounting nudges: Harnessing mobile payment systems to improve sanitation.

The proliferation of mobile money across developing countries has led to an increase in availability of mobile payment systems. This decreases the organizational complexity of allowing more flexible payment terms for customers. We test whether subsidies, deposit requirements, and access to a mobile money savings vehicle increase the propensity of households to purchase an improved but more expensive sanitation service.