Water privatization reduces child mortality

By PDS | 29 April 2005

Most developing countries are committed to increasing access to safe water and thereby reducing child mortality, but there is little consensus on how to actually improve water services. Some NGOs put ideological purity before water purity and oppose private sector water provision despite knowing that private sector capital and know-how can be used to build water and sewage infrastructures in poor countries.

In the 1990s Argentina embarked on one of the largest privatization campaigns in the world, including the privatization of local water companies covering approximately 30% of the country's municipalities. Analysing the variation in ownership of water provision across time and space generated by the privatisation process, Sebastian Galiani of the Universidad de San Andres and Paul Gertler of the University of California, Berkeley and National Bureau of Economic Research, found that child mortality fell 8% in the areas that privatized their water services and that the effect was largest (26%) in the poorest areas. They found that privatization was associated with significant reductions in deaths from infectious and parasitic diseases.

The research was published in the Journal of Political Economy. Download Water for Life: The Impact of the Privatization of Water Services on Child Mortality (PDF), by Sebastian Galiani, Paul Gertler, and Ernesto Schargrodsky.