IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ays/ispwps/paper0004.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

User Charge Financing of Urban Public Services in Africa

Author

Abstract

Expansion and improvement of public services is essential to improving quality of life and productivity in developing countries. Some African countries have been diligent in expanding the infrastructure necessary to provide public services, but unfortunately, most have not done a very good job of paying for them. Imposition of user charges to fund public services would go far toward eliminating the financial problems faced by many African countries in providing services and would raise additional revenues that could be used to pay for other government expenditures. In addition to the financial benefits of user charges, there are many other benefits from their imposition. User charges have the potential to greatly improve the public sector’s efficiency, to impart a more equitable distribution of the financing burden of public services, to provide better information regarding infrastructure needs, and to improve the quality of existing services.This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the general nature of user charges: what they are, the services upon which they should be imposed, and evidence of the willingness to pay them. Section 3 discusses the extent to which user charges have been imposed in Africa in the past. Section 4 articulates the theory behind the efficient pricing of public services, resulting in a guide for setting appropriate user charges - in general as well as under special but common circumstances. Section 5 addresses the revenue implications of user charge financing, including the tendency of efficient prices to raise adequate revenues, ways to recover costs when efficient prices lead to deficits, and the attractiveness of user charges for taxation. Section 6 examines equity considerations of user charges. Finally, the analysis is brought together in section 7 by means of a case study of water supply services in Egypt. Throughout the paper, special attention is paid to the practical issues of levying user charges in Africa, issues which are too often overlooked in the literature. Concluding comments are provided in Section 8.

Suggested Citation

  • William Fox & Kelly Edmiston, 2000. "User Charge Financing of Urban Public Services in Africa," International Center for Public Policy Working Paper Series, at AYSPS, GSU paper0004, International Center for Public Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University.
    • Handle: RePEc:ays:ispwps:paper0004
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://icepp.gsu.edu/files/2015/03/ispwp0004.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Yew-Kwang Ng & Mendel Weisser, 1974. "Optimal Pricing with a Budget Constraint—The Case of the Two-part Tariff," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 41(3), pages 337-345.
    2. Baumol, William J & Bradford, David F, 1970. "Optimal Departures from Marginal Cost Pricing," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 60(3), pages 265-283, June.
    3. Martin S. Feldstein, 1972. "Equity and Efficiency in Public Sector Pricing: The Optimal Two-Part Tariff," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 86(2), pages 175-187.
    4. Anderson, Dennis, 1989. "Infrastructure pricing policies and the public revenue in African countries," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 17(4), pages 525-542, April.
    5. Whittington, Dale & Okorafor, Apia & Okore, Augustine & McPhail, Alexander, 1990. "Cost recovery strategy for rural water delivery in Nigeria," Policy Research Working Paper Series 369, The World Bank.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Simanti Bandyopadhyay & Debraj Bagchi, 2013. "Are User Charges Underutilsed in Indian Cities? An Analysis for Delhi," International Center for Public Policy Working Paper Series, at AYSPS, GSU paper1326, International Center for Public Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University.
    2. James Alm, 2015. "Financing Urban Infrastructure: Knowns, Unknowns, And A Way Forward," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(2), pages 230-262, April.
    3. World Bank, 2007. "Ethiopia - Accelerating Equitable Growth : Country Economic Memorandum, Part 2. Thematic Chapters," World Bank Publications - Reports 7866, The World Bank Group.

    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. Severin Borenstein & Lucas W. Davis, 2012. "The Equity and Efficiency of Two-Part Tariffs in U.S. Natural Gas Markets," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 55(1), pages 75-128.
    2. Walter Cont & Fernando Navajas & Francisco Pizzi & Alberto Porto, 2020. "Precios y tarifas de servicios públicos. Evolución. 1945-2018," Asociación Argentina de Economía Política: Working Papers 4328, Asociación Argentina de Economía Política.
    3. Pang‐Ryong Kim, 1997. "The Effect of Profit Regulations on Combined Two‐Part and Peak‐Load Pricing," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 73(222), pages 238-247, September.
    4. José Silva Ruiz, 2010. "La eficiencia y la equidad en la fijación de precios de los servicios públicos: evolución de la teoría de la tarifa óptima en dos partes y el caso del servicio de agua potable," Revista CIFE, Universidad Santo Tomás, June.
    5. De Borger, Bruno, 2001. "Discrete choice models and optimal two-part tariffs in the presence of externalities: optimal taxation of cars," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 31(4), pages 471-504, July.
    6. Ibrahim Abada & Andreas Ehrenmann & Xavier Lambin, 2018. "Unintended consequences: The snowball effect of energy communities," Working Papers EPRG 1812, Energy Policy Research Group, Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge.
    7. De Borger, Bruno, 2000. "Optimal two-part tariffs in a model of discrete choice," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 76(1), pages 127-150, April.
    8. Carmona, Miguel, 2010. "The regulatory function in public-private partnerships for the provision of transport infrastructure," Research in Transportation Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(1), pages 110-125.
    9. Winston Chang & Lawrence Southwick, 1987. "On the pricing and benefit structure of a private club or public utility," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 55(3), pages 227-244, October.
    10. Guillermo Gallego & Michael Z. F. Li & Yan Liu, 2020. "Dynamic Nonlinear Pricing of Inventories over Finite Sales Horizons," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 68(3), pages 655-670, May.
    11. María Angeles García Valiñas, 2004. "Eficiencia y equidad en el diseño de precios óptimos para bienes y servicios públicos," Hacienda Pública Española / Review of Public Economics, IEF, vol. 168(1), pages 95-119, march.
    12. Roger Sherman & Michael Visscher, 1982. "Rate-of-Return Regulation and Two-Part Tariffs," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 97(1), pages 27-42.
    13. Stephen J. Bailey, 1994. "User-charges for Urban Services," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 31(4-5), pages 745-765, May.
    14. Murray Fulton & James Vercammen, 2014. "Optimal NGO Financing of a Resource Management Certification Scheme," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 58(4), pages 605-626, August.
    15. Sara Hsu & David Kiefer, 2005. "Perfect Price Discrimination is not So Perfect," Working Paper Series, Department of Economics, University of Utah 2005_04, University of Utah, Department of Economics.
    16. Deb, Kaushik & Filippini, Massimo, 2011. "Estimating welfare changes from efficient pricing in public bus transit in India," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 18(1), pages 23-31, January.
    17. Oliver, Matthew E., 2019. "Pricing flexibility under rate-of-return regulation: Effects on network infrastructure investment," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 150-161.
    18. Nicolas Astier, 2021. "Second‐best pricing for incomplete market segments: Application to electricity pricing," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 23(6), pages 1287-1311, December.
    19. Holguin-Veras, Jose & Jara-Diaz, Sergio, 1998. "Optimal pricing for priority service and space allocation in container ports," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 81-106, April.
    20. Schmalensee, Richard, 1981. "Output and Welfare Implications of Monopolistic Third-Degree Price Discrimination," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 71(1), pages 242-247, March.

    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:ays:ispwps:paper0004. 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: Paul Benson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ispgsus.html .

    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.