Abstract

While progress has been made for providing drinking water through the completion of the Millennium Development Goals and other international programs, millions of people still do not have access to clean drinking water. This study examines how drinking water coverage is impacted using three regime ownership models. Using the framework of the privately-owned, publicly-owned, and decentralized regime models, the impacts of water production, non-revenue water, and unit operation cost are evaluated for drinking water coverage. A sample of 144 utilities across 33 countries were sampled using data from the International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities. Using ordinary least squares modeling, results indicate that predicting water coverage from water production, non-revenue water, and unit operational costs provided weak explanations of variation for both publicly-owned and decentralized regimes. None of the three regime models established a significant relationship between water coverage and all three independent variables. For publicly- and privately-owned water regimes, decreasing non-revenue water by plugging leaks and improving infrastructure can translate into higher rates of water coverage. For decentralized water regimes, higher levels of unit operational cost can increase water coverage. The regression analyses also showed that broad claims about regime ownership, efficiency, and improved water coverage should be suspect. None of the three regime models established a significant relationship between water coverage and all three independent variables. This suggests that the competing claims that privatized drinking water utilities as being more efficient or more able to provide water coverage as compared to other types of utilities in the literature is not supported when compared across countries.

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