This paper provides an overview of approaches to the economic regulation of piped water supply and sewerage systems. The discussion emphasizes the particular importance that quality issues take on in water systems relative to any other infrastructure sector. Water quality is obviously important...

This paper describes and analyzes the effort to institute river basin management in the Tárcoles basin of Costa Rica. Located in west-central Costa Rica, the Tárcoles basin represents 4.2 percent of the nation's total land area, but is home to half the nation's population and the metropolitan...

Economic efficiency has to do with how much wealth a given resource base can generate. Equity has to do with how that wealth is to be distributed in society. Economic efficiency gets far more attention, in part because equity considerations involve value judgements that vary from person to...

The Bolivian government awarded a concession for water and sewer services in La Pazand El Alto in 1997. One goal of doing so was to expand in-house water and sewer service to low-income households. The author uses the Aguas del Illimani case to explore how the design of typical concession...

From the earliest times, water resources have been allocated on the basis of social criteria -maintaining the community by ensuring that water is available for human consumption, for sanitation, and for food production. Societies have invested capital in infrastructure to maintain this...

This cross-country evaluation of institutional responses to problems in the water sector shows that changes in the nature of water problems have changed the development paradigm underlying water institutions. There is increasing recognition of how decentralized allocation mechanisms can...

The authors review the applications of noncooperative bargaining theory to waterrelated issues-which fall in the category of formal models of negotiation. They aim to identify the conditions under which agreements are likely to emerge and their characteristics, to support policymakers in...

Introducing private sector participation (PSP) into the water and sewerage sectors in developing countries is difficult and controversial. Empirical studies on its effects are scant and generally inconclusive. Case studies tend to find improvements in the sector following privatization, but they...

The cholera epidemic in Peru brought to light the miserable state of local water and sanitation conditions. The author discusses the relationship between waterbone diseases and water and sewerage conditions in Peruvian peri-urban areas, or pueblos jovenes. These diseases are associated with poor...

As water scarcity and population pressures increase, more countries are adopting water pricing mechanisms, as their primary means of regulating the consumption of irrigation water. The way to allocate water efficiently is to"get the prices right", but how to accomplish this is open to debate....