This paper argues that there are many challenges to designing and implementing water and sanitation interventions that actually deliver economic benefits to the households in developing countries. Perhaps most critical to successful water and sanitation investments is to discover and implement...

The paper challenges the conventional wisdom that water and sanitation improvements and other preventive health interventions are always a wise economic investment. Costs and benefits are presented for six water, sanitation, and health programs—handwashing, sanitation, point-of-use filtration...

Economic and epidemiological data collected in Beira, Mozambique, are used to conduct this first social cost--benefit analysis for cholera vaccination in Sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis compares the net economic benefits of three immunization strategies with and without user fees: school-based...

This paper reports the results of the first study that estimates households' private demand for cholera vaccines using the travel cost method. We take advantage of an unusual natural experiment. In January 2004, more than 41,000 residents from various locations in Beira, Mozambique received two...

Although it is well known that vaccines against many infectious diseases confer positive economic externalities via indirect protection, analysts have typically ignored possible herd protection effects in policy analyses of vaccination programs. Despite a growing literature on the economic...

This article develops a “real options” approach for planning new water resources infrastructure investments and their operating strategies in a world of climate change uncertainty. The approach is illustrated with an example: investments in large new multipurpose dam alternatives along the...

This paper proposes and illustrates the use of a new approach to benefit transfer for the non-market valuation of environmental resources. It treats transfer as an identification problem that requires assessing whether available benefit estimates permit the parameters of a preference function to...

Evaluation of programs, either before they are designed or after they are implemented, are increasingly viewed as a critical for learning and improving accountability of public policies. Unfortunately, resource and environmental economists in developing countries have little or no training or...

Trees can be considered as investments made by economic agents to prevent depreciation of natural assets such as stocks of top soil and water. In agroforestry systems farmers use trees in this manner by deliberately combining them with agricultural crops on the same unit of land. Although...