Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Public Funding of Sanitation Infrastructure: An analysis of Voter Behavior and Health Outcomes

California Institute Of Technology, Pasadena CA

Investigators

Abstract

Clean water and sewers are essential for economic development. But how the provision of such sanitation infrastructure is affected by political institutions remains unknown, even though classic theoretical results predict more spending on clean water and sewers as governments become democratic. However, these theoretical papers, as well as most empirical studies, focus on government redistribution. They ignore the very real possibility that demand for sanitary infrastructure is increasing in income, and if it is, then democracy could be associated with less spending on clean water and sewers, particularly when the poor get the right to vote. Using an original data set, the proposed research seeks to resolve this issue by studying how government investment in sanitation infrastructure is shaped by the extension of voting rights to the poor and its consequences for health and mortality rates. The data set comes from Britain in the years 1870-1914. Nineteenth-century Britain offers a valuable opportunity for testing how political institutions influenced government spending on sanitation infrastructure. The rapid urbanization accompanying the Industrial Revolution overwhelmed existing sanitary infrastructure, and left local governments facing new demands for public goods that they were ill-equipped to handle. The study exploits variation in the size of the electorate over time and across towns to test the effects of extending the franchise on the level of sanitary investment and mortality. This project constructs a new comprehensive annual dataset of mortality, sanitary investment and the extent of the franchise at town-level. In addition to testing the effect of political institutions on infrastructure spending, the dataset will also be used to identify the importance of sanitary investment for the decline in mortality rates during the period, which will shed light on the ability of subnational governments to counter the health consequences of urbanization. Further, the study will complement recent work by economic historians in measuring and explaining growth in government capacity at the local level and hence, importantly, investments in sanitation infrastructure. At the conclusion of the project efforts will be made to make the data publicly available through the Global Price and Incomes History group or the IPCSR.