Assessing Household Willingness to Pay for Quality Sanitation Services in Urban Areas of Pakistan

Addressing the problem of rapid deterioration of environment in urban areas has not produced the desired results in developing countries. This paper is an attempt to asses household willingness to pay (WTP) for Quality Sanitation Services (QSS) like sewage disposal, solid waste management and clearance of municipal drains in Peshawar city. For assessing WTP, Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) and Bid-wise Binary Logic Model were applied to a sample size of six hundred (600). Result analysis shows that 92.8 percent of household were not satisfied with existing situation of sanitation services and want improvement in the services. Policy variables: household income, education, occupation, size and ownership of the respondents, were used as regresses. Among the policy variable, household income, education and occupation were statistically significant for the first three bids in the model.  This study further elaborated that 452 respondents were in odd of 1^st bid and were willing to pay Rupees 220 per month for QSS. This paper recommended that CVM was an appropriate tool for estimating WTP for QSS. The application of CVM and Logit Model to find WTP will not only collect more revenues for the public utility companies but will also make service delivery more efficient and sustainable.

Note: Data analyzed in this paper is extracted from my own doctoral dissertation.