Political determinants of investment in water and sanitation: Evidence from Brazilian elections

Abstract

This paper studies the extent to which political determinants play a role in the investment decisions for water and sanitation (WS) services. We focus on the political alignment between local and state officials using the outcomes of close mayoral elections in Brazil. We find that mayors of municipalities with self-run WS companies aligned with the state governor significantly decreased investment in their WS systems compared to unaligned mayors, providing evidence that politics plays a role in the running of public utilities.

Publisher

Elsevier

Publication Date

4-1-2020

Publication Title

Economics Letters

Department

Economics

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2020.109041

Keywords

Water and sanitation, Public utilities, Development, Federalism, Elections, Regression discontinuity

Language

English

Format

text

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