IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/bindes/v36y2000i3p73-92.html

Block Rate Pricing of Water in Indonesia: An Analysis of Welfare Effects

Author

Listed:
  • Piet Rietveld
  • Jan Rouwendal
  • Bert Zwart

Abstract

Block rate pricing of piped water in Indonesian cities has a progressive structure: the marginal price paid increases with the volume of demand. This paper estimates household water demand in Salatiga city using the Burtless and Hausman model, and finds that its distribution is not unimodal—that data cluster around kinks. The main estimation results are a price elasticity of approximately-1.2 and an income elasticity of 0.05. These elasticities are mutually dependent. The estimated model is used to investigate the social welfare consequences of a shift to uniform pricing. The principal beneficiaries would be large households, which are not necessarily wealthy. While replacing the complex rate structure by a uniform marginal price would have positive effects on average welfare, the equity consequences would be small. To improve equity, water companies could reduce installation fees, giving low-income households access to water connections, or reinvest profits in network expansion to unserviced areas.

Suggested Citation

  • Piet Rietveld & Jan Rouwendal & Bert Zwart, 2000. "Block Rate Pricing of Water in Indonesia: An Analysis of Welfare Effects," Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(3), pages 73-92.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:bindes:v:36:y:2000:i:3:p:73-92
    DOI: 10.1080/00074910012331338983
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00074910012331338983
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00074910012331338983?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Willig, Robert D, 1976. "Consumer's Surplus without Apology," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 66(4), pages 589-597, September.
    2. Michael L. Nieswiadomy & David J. Molina, 1989. "Comparing Residential Water Demand Estimates under Decreasing and Increasing Block Rates Using Household Data," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 65(3), pages 280-289.
    3. Vartia, Yrjo O, 1983. "Efficient Methods of Measuring Welfare Change and Compensated Income in Terms of Ordinary Demand Functions," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 51(1), pages 79-98, January.
    4. Burtless, Gary & Hausman, Jerry A, 1978. "The Effect of Taxation on Labor Supply: Evaluating the Gary Negative Income Tax Experiments," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 86(6), pages 1103-1130, December.
    5. Julie A. Hewitt & W. Michael Hanemann, 1995. "A Discrete/Continuous Choice Approach to Residential Water Demand under Block Rate Pricing," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 71(2), pages 173-192.
    6. Moffitt, Robert, 1990. "The Econometrics of Kinked Budget Constraints," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 4(2), pages 119-139, Spring.
    7. Hausman, Jerry A, 1981. "Exact Consumer's Surplus and Deadweight Loss," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 71(4), pages 662-676, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Arjan Ruijs, 2007. "Welfare and Distribution Effects of Water Pricing Policies," Working Papers 2007.92, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
    2. Diakité, Daouda & Semenov, Aggey & Thomas, Alban, 2009. "A proposal for social pricing of water supply in Côte d'Ivoire," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(2), pages 258-268, March.
    3. Daouda Diakité & Alban Thomas, 2011. "La demande domestique d’eau potable : une étude sur un panel de communes ivoiriennes," L'Actualité Economique, Société Canadienne de Science Economique, vol. 87(3), pages 269-299.
    4. Piet Rietveld & Jan Rouwendal & Bert Zwart, 1997. "Estimating Water Demand in Urban Indonesia: A Maximum Likelihood Approach to block Rate Pricing Data," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 97-072/3, Tinbergen Institute.
    5. Gan, Li & Ju, Gaosheng & Zhu, Xi, 2015. "Nonparametric estimation of structural labor supply and exact welfare change under nonconvex piecewise-linear budget sets," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 188(2), pages 526-544.
    6. Olmstead, Sheila M. & Michael Hanemann, W. & Stavins, Robert N., 2007. "Water demand under alternative price structures," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 54(2), pages 181-198, September.
    7. Kumar, Anil, 2008. "Labor supply, deadweight loss and tax reform act of 1986: A nonparametric evaluation using panel data," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(1-2), pages 236-253, February.
    8. Olmstead, Sheila & Hanemann, Michael & Stavins, Robert, 2005. "Do Consumers React to the Shape of Supply? Water Demand Under Heterogeneous Price Structures," Working Paper Series rwp05-039, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    9. Arbues, Fernando & Garcia-Valinas, Maria Angeles & Martinez-Espineira, Roberto, 2003. "Estimation of residential water demand: a state-of-the-art review," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 32(1), pages 81-102, March.
    10. Ruijs, Arjan, 2007. "Welfare and Distribution Effects of Water Pricing Policies," Natural Resources Management Working Papers 7441, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM).
    11. Céline Nauges & Alban Thomas, 2000. "Privately Operated Water Utilities, Municipal Price Negotiation, and Estimation of Residential Water Demand: The Case of France," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 76(1), pages 68-85.
    12. Peter C. Reiss & Matthew W. White, 2006. "Evaluating Welfare with Nonlinear Prices," NBER Working Papers 12370, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. Smith, V. Kerry & van Houtven, George & Pattanayak, Subhrendu K., 1999. "Benefit Transfer as Preference Calibration," Discussion Papers 10607, Resources for the Future.
    14. Stefan Hoderlein & Anne Vanhems, 2018. "Estimating the distribution of welfare effects using quantiles," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 33(1), pages 52-72, January.
    15. Aaron Strong & V. Kerry Smith, 2010. "Reconsidering the Economics of Demand Analysis with Kinked Budget Constraints," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 86(1), pages 173-190.
    16. Dumagan, Jesus C. & Mount, Timothy D., 1997. "Approximating compensated income from ordinary demand functions1," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 55(2), pages 191-201, August.
    17. Darío F. Jiménez & Sergio A. Orrego & Felipe A. Vásquez & Roberto D. Ponce, 2017. "Estimating water demand for urban residential use using a discrete-continuous model and disaggregated data at the household level: the case of the city of Manizales, Colombia," Lecturas de Economía, Universidad de Antioquia, Departamento de Economía, issue 86, pages 153-178, Enero - J.
    18. Lam Do & Thai-Ha Le, 2023. "On the welfare effect of retail electricity subsidy in Vietnam," Journal of Economics and Development, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 25(4), pages 286-301, August.
    19. Jerry A. Hausman & Whitney K. Newey, 2016. "Individual Heterogeneity and Average Welfare," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 84, pages 1225-1248, May.
    20. David S. Bullock & Philip Garcia & Kie‐Yup Shin, 2005. "Measuring producer welfare under output price uncertainty and risk non‐neutrality," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 49(1), pages 1-21, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:bindes:v:36:y:2000:i:3:p:73-92. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CBIE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.