Agua, pobreza y uso del tiempo en México: Análisis cuantitativo como sustento del diseño de una política pública de doble dividendo

Water scarcity and pollution affect large sectors of the population, but they occur excessively on the poor. The relationship between water availability and poverty is of great importance for the public health and social equity. This essay studies the relationship between lack of access to water, the time dedicated to work and income levels. With infor-mation taken from the National Survey on Time-Use 2002 (INEGI) it is estimated the gap in income and hours worked among people who allocated time fetching water and those that did not perform this activity by a propensity score matching method, which considers personal characteristics and municipality level characteristics. In both cases, there is a sta-tistically significant difference. Caeteris paribus, in the first case, the household income-gap is of 18%. In the second, the time allocated to work of a person who carries water decreas-es about 13%. These results suggest that the lack of access to water is a condition that has a significant impact in making a person more susceptible to fall into a condition of poverty. Thus, a public policy aiming at increasing water supply coverage will directly increase ben-eficiaries’ wellbeing while alleviating their poverty levels by increasing time devoted to productive activities. Water provision then, yields a double dividend.