Willingness to Pay for Water Service Improvements
Summary
Willingness to pay (WTP) for water service improvements refers to the monetary valuation that households or individuals assign to enhancements in the quality, reliability or availability of water supply and associated sanitation services. This concept is central to economic appraisals of water infrastructure investments, enabling policymakers and utilities to balance cost recovery with social equity. By employing stated-preference techniques—such as contingent valuation and choice experiments—researchers capture user preferences for service attributes including source safety, uninterrupted delivery and taste. Meta-analyses and benefit-transfer approaches consolidate results across diverse contexts, providing transferable estimates for regions lacking primary valuation studies. Globally, WTP evidence informs tariff design, subsidy targeting and priority setting in asset management, ecosystem-based water resource protection and contamination remediation. Integrating these insights supports more efficient allocation of public funds, enhances stakeholder engagement and ensures that improvements align with community needs, thus contributing to both sustainable development and public health objectives.
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Willingness to Pay for Water Service Improvements publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in willingness to pay for water service improvements across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Willingness to Pay (WTP): The highest amount an individual is prepared to pay for an improvement in a non-market good or service.
Contingent Valuation Method (CVM): A survey-based approach to elicit valuations for hypothetical changes in service provision.
Choice Experiment: A discrete-choice technique in which respondents select preferred combinations of service attributes and prices.
Benefit Transfer: The statistical application of valuation estimates from existing studies to new policy or geographic contexts.
Meta-Analysis: A quantitative method for synthesising results across multiple studies to derive central tendency and explanatory variables.
References
- Valuing drinking water quality after a PFAS contamination event: Results from a meta-analysis benefit transfer. Journal of Environmental Management (2024).
- Willingness to Pay for Improved Water Supply Services Based on Asset Management: A Contingent Valuation Study in South Korea. Water (2021).
- Household Willingness to Pay for Wastewater Treatment and Water Supply System Improvement in a Ger Area in Ulaanbaatar City, Mongolia. Water (2019).
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