Contents
- The Past, Present, and Future of Sanitation: Where and Why We Should Give a Sh*t – Jessica Kaliski | 1
- Income Inequality and Financial Market Participation: Rural and Urban China – Yidan Jin | 57
- The Developing Economy of Technology and EGovernance in Moldova: A Comparative Case Study to Estonia and Analysis of Geopolitical Relations on Moldova’s Move into the 21st Century – Caitlin Andersh | 99
- The Real Unemployment Rate? Estimating NAIRU with Alternative Measures of Unemployment – Phillip Gustafson | 129
Preface
A Note from the Editorial Board
The Editorial Board of this year’s edition of the Massachusetts Undergraduate Journal of Economics was compromised of Andre Gellerman, Andrew Furman, Parham Yousef Gorji, Marton Gal, and Dakota Firenze. The five of us would firstly like to thank all of the students from colleges and universities across Massachusetts for their time and effort in submitting great papers that varied in both scope and content. Given the quality of the papers submitted, attempting to choose from them proved to be a difficult task. Each paper that made it into the journal was ultimately chosen through a vote of collective support by the Editorial Board members. Once chosen, each paper was paired off with an Editor, who worked with the respective author to hone his or her paper to be ready for publishing. This year, we are publishing four unique and timely papers that demonstrate the depth and breadth of the economics discipline.
Our continued hope for MUJE is to carve a place for students to meaningfully express their unique ideas through a medium created specifically for undergraduates, and to work with future editors to create the most academically rigorous journal possible.
We would also like to especially thank our Submissions Liaison Aaron Goslee, the UMass Economics Department, as well as recent and past alumni for their continued support.
Best regards,
Dakota Firenze, on behalf of the Editorial Board,
Massachusetts Undergraduate Journal of Economics 2014-15
A Note From the Submissions Liaison
Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “Fire destroys all sophistry, that is deceit; and maintains truth alone, that is gold.” I am pleased to join the editorial board in presenting these four papers, whose authors take out their tongs and put our most precious good, thought, through the fire. Exhibited here are a group of people who have spent considerable time in the pursuit of knowledge, who hold onto the belief that we can advance our understanding of the phenomena we experience and reach new conclusions that melt clouds and bring us to better summits. With exponentially growing vectors of distraction dinging about our periphery and an onslaught of proclaimed authorities with powerful backers and a knack for free associating important ideas populating an increasing number of sources, honing scientific methodology and cautiously applying these methods to a central hypothesis in the pursuit of truth is the ultimate act of faith.
With gratitude,
Aaron W. Goslee,
Submissions Liaison and Head of Publication Working Group,
2014-2015
Chapter 1
The Past, Present, and Future of Sanitation: Where and Why We Should Give a Sh*t Jessica Kaliski, Amherst College
jrkaliski@gmail.com
1. Introduction
1a. No Toilet, No Bride
You consult astrologers about rahu-ketu (the alignment of sun and moon) before getting married. You should also look whether there is a toilet in your groom’s home before you decide. Don’t get married in a house where there is no toilet (Malm, 2012).
– Minister for Rural Development, Jaairam Ramesh
In 2005, local authorities established a massive media campaign to encourage the construction of toilets and to broadcast the importance of respecting the right of women to use latrines in privacy and security in Haryana, India. The campaign used radios, banners, and other advertising channels to disperse information, using phrases, such as, “no toilet, no bride” and “no loo, no I do,” to target families of marriage-age girls to demand that potential suitors’ families construct a latrine prior to marriage. The strikingly competitive marriage market in the Punjab region – with an average of 87 women for every 100 males (Stopnitzky, 2012) – made women scarce commodities and forced men to distinguish themselves amongst the competitive field. The campaign’s innovative approach effectively changed the cultural and social taboo associated with toilets, and with sanitation more broadly. Toilets became instrumental to the marriage market, and thus prompted a value of and demand for toilets amongst the families of marriage-age boys: “I will have to work hard to afford a toilet. We won’t get any bride if we don’t have one now. I won’t be offended when the woman I like asks for a toilet.” (Stopnitzky, 2012).
The “No Toilet, No Bride” campaign represents an exemplary model for the future of sanitation reforms. This campaign was marked by the strong presence and influence of local authorities, who effectively created a value of and demand for toilet construction and usage among residents in Haryana, India. The design did not simply provide toilets, but changed the community’s perception of toilets – from unnecessary to essential, and from a social taboo to a social norm.
Sanitation is a worldwide problem, and one with sometimes awkward and highly charged topics and words – from “public defecation” to “feces” – that invoke political, cultural, religious, social, and economic issues. Solutions to ameliorate sanitary problems must be found through a holistic approach of the “politics of shit,” which examines the environmental, social, political, and historical dimensions of toilets. In addition, an approach must address how a community’s society and culture intersects with the institutions responsible for providing sanitation amenities or who might have contributed to, or exacerbated, the current sanitation crisis. This paper seeks to understand the interaction between supply and demand for toilets and ultimately forecast the way in which sanitation reforms should proceed in the future. Demand for toilet construction and usage falls within the realm of the user: individuals must decrease the value of “unsanitary” ways of defecation, and subsequently increase the value of and demand for toilets. Supply for toilet construction falls within the hands of institutions – public and private organizations – or within the hands of individuals. Following a holistic framework, I argue that the solution must include not only the construction of toilets, but also the reconstruction of behavioral and cultural norms. Communities must see both the individual and collective value of toilet construction and usage; and nationally, political regimes must reorient their goals to focus less on quantitative and short-term solutions, which solely address the physical installation of toilets, and more on sustainable solutions, which incorporate educational components to ensure long-term behavioral change and continual usage of the toilets.
Part 1 looks at the sanitation issue as a whole, to better understand the inter- and intra-country inequalities of poor sanitation amenities, as well as the interaction between public defecation and the environment on the quality of sanitation. Part 2 analyzes the role of demand in sanitation reforms. Taking an economic model of human behavior approach, I use Pattanayak et al.’s (2007) model of toilet adoption to obtain an individual’s demand for toilet construction through utility maximization. This demand model will help illuminate ways in which demand for toilet construction and usage can be increased, paying heed to the interactions of culture, religion, and history, among others in toilet adoption. After an understanding of the demand side, Part 3 focuses on supply, and investigates the political and social limitations and constraints that can impede toilet adoption. Finally, Part 4 looks at past health reforms after wide-scale health epidemics to provide insights for future implementation of effective sanitation reforms.
1b. Sanitation: A Global Issue
The [Millennium Development Goals] MDGs were never meant to be a one-way street – something that rich countries do for the poor. Quite the contrary: our long-standing work for development in general has always been based on global solidarity – on a shared interest – on a powerful sense of community and linked fates in an interconnected world (United Nations).
– Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in his closing remarks to the MDG Summit, September 22, 2010
In September 2000, members of the United Nations (UN) adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration. Through the Declaration, committed members agreed to a number of time-bound targets and goals – designed to ameliorate poverty, hunger, and disease, with a deadline of 2015. These goals have collectively been termed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Beyond financial and physical support, the MDGs call for a collective, “global partnership,” to “help give voice to the hopes, aspirations, and vital needs of the world’s poorest and most voiceless people” (Sachs, 2005).
One of the goals (#7) of the MDGs is to ensure environmental sustainability. Target 7.C intends to “halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation,” with basic sanitation defined as “the proportion of population using an improved sanitation facility” (UNICEF, 2014a). Poor sanitation and the practice of public defecation can have a series of environmental, health, and economic ramifications on affected communities. The combination of poor sanitation, water, and hygiene leads to about 700,000 premature deaths annually, as well as the loss of approximately 443 million school days as a result of subsequent diseases (The World Bank, 2014). Missed school days can have long-term impacts on future economic productivity of both individuals and society collectively. In fact, economic losses from lack of access to sanitation or increased health system costs are estimated at US$260 billion annually (The World Bank, 2013). Beyond a physical health concern, public defecation opens the door to sexual harassment and violence when women are forced to utilize open areas (The World Bank, 2014), and hence acts as an inconvenience, threatens privacy, and increases embarrassment, among other discomforts (Mara et al., 2010). Since 51% of the world population did not have access to an improved sanitation facility in 1991, in order to meet the 2015 target, this proportion must be reduced to 25% by 2015 (World Health Organization & UNICEF, 2014). Although 1.9 billion people gained access to a latrine or other improved sanitation facility between 1990 and 2011 (WHO & UNICEF, 2014), if current trends persist, the MDG sanitation target will fall short by over half a billion people (WHO & UNICEF, 2014).
“Lack of improved sanitation,” according to The World Bank, includes defecation in the open – in a bush, field, or forest – or the use of a pit latrine without a slab, bucket toilets, hanging toilets/latrines, or toilets that “flush” untreated waste into the environment (The World Bank Group). “Proper sanitation,” therefore could consist of the use of a range of toilets: pit latrines with a slab, ecological toilets, or water-flush and pour-flush toilets. For the remainder of this paper, “toilets” will be used to refer to this broad range of “proper sanitation” equipment.
Although one billion people are without access to sanitation facilities, this subset of individuals is not evenly dispersed globally. Rather, it is a “rural and poverty-related phenomenon,” and is particularly concentrated in Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (WHO & UNICEF, 2014). Among other reasons, these particular countries may face higher population concentrations, which put a strain on the availability and maintenance of public sanitation facilities, or contain a larger segment of poor individuals who are unable to afford proper sanitation amenities. In addition to inter-country variation, there is also intra-country variation, with large disparities between rich and poor populations, as well as urban and rural populations. In many instances, the wealthiest 20% receive coverage before the poorest 20%, increasing the wealth gap to access (WHO & UNICEF, 2014). The urban-rural divide is also striking: 70% (902 million people) of those without access to an improved sanitation facility reside in rural areas (WHO & UNICEF, 2014). Although the poor-rich and urban-rural divides invoke the most significant disparities, inequalities also exist among gender, ethnicity, language, education, and religion.
1c. Public Defecation, the Environment, and Sanitation
The combination of poor sanitation facilities and open defecation is a concern for both environmental and human health. Edwin Chadwick first made the link between lack of sanitation and disease in the mid-19th century. Through examination of the poor living conditions, disease, and life expectancy of English and Welsh residents, and using statistics from the General Registration (Chadwick, 1842), Chadwick concluded,
- The defective town cleansing fosters habits of the most abject degradation and tends to the demoralization of large numbers of human beings, who subsist by means of what they find amidst the noxious filth accumulated in neglected streets and bye-places (Chadwick, 1843).
Attributing disease to uncleanliness, Chadwick advocated for cleaning, draining, and ventilating as means to improve health. John Snow built upon Chadwick’s claim by discovering the link between uncleanliness and human health. Snow, using the Broad Street Pump incident as an example, showed how sewage – specifically, a baby’s diaper polluted with cholera – from a nearby cesspit contaminated the county’s water source and thus infected anyone who drank the water from the pump (Summers, 1989). Water was identified as the source of transmission, exemplifying the effects of poor sanitation on human health via water-borne diseases.
Similar to the diaper that contaminated the water source in London, human excreta from public defecation can also generate environmental and human health concerns. One gram of fresh feces from an infected person can contain up to 106 viral pathogens, 106 -108 bacterial pathogens, 104 protozoan cysts or oocysts, and 10-104 helminth eggs (Mara et al., 2010). Public defecation in open fields can lead to human contact with excreta via various water routes: contamination of fingers, field crops, food, flies, etc. (Cairncross & Valdmanis, 2006). This environmental-health link helps explain the environmental, health, and economic ramifications on affected communities noted above. Moreover, the World Health Organization reports about 600 million episodes of diarrhea and 400,000 childhood deaths a year due to contaminated water and lack of sanitation, with an estimated 80% of all diseases and one-third of all deaths in developing countries induced by consumption of contaminated water (Rajgire, 2013).
A relevant example is a study by Rajgire (2013) who looked at the effect of open defecation practices on the chemical and bacteriological quality of water in open-defecation-free (ODF) and open-defecation-not-free (ODNF) villages in the Amravati District of India. In these villages, individuals used water from various sources, including open well, tube well, hand pump, and water supplied by Gram Panchayat (GP)2 for drinking and domestic use. Using data from 138 villages, Rajgire’s (2013) results show that feces contaminated 17% of the water samples from ODF villages, and 48% of the samples from ODNF villages. Using antibiotic resistance analysis, both the ODF and ODNF villages’ water samples were shown to have a poor water quality index, and to contain thermotolerant coliform (TTC) and E. coli bacteria, both of which are indicators of fecal pollution (Rajgire, 2013). The presence of TTC and E. coli, as well as the results of other antibiotic resistance tests, provided evidence that open defecation was the source of pollution, as opposed to other potential channels, such as sewage and domestic waste.
Poor health due to inadequate sanitation is a byproduct of a complex human-environment cycle: public defecation in open fields enters and contaminates water sources, these polluted water sources interact with crops, food, flies, etc., and eventually transfer their contaminants to humans. This cycle can be broken through installation of adequate sanitation measures, such as latrines or toilets. However, construction is not enough; there must both be a demand for such facilities and the presence of a proper supply, so that the toilets that are installed are actually used and continually maintained.
2A GP is similar to a village council, and is the first unit in India’s three-tier governmental system (the GP at the village level, the Tahsil at the block level, and the Zilla Panchayat at the district level).
2. The Demand for Toilets
2a. Framework: A Theoretical Demand for Toilets
Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), India’s first prime minister, remarked, “The day every one of us gets a toilet to use, I shall know that our country has reached the pinnacle of progress” (Aswathy, 2014). Yet the presence of a toilet in of itself is not enough to ameliorate India’s poor sanitation: the value of a toilet must be realized and appreciated so that when a toilet is constructed, it is actually used. Demand for toilets is reliant upon the value individuals place on toilets. To increase this value requires an understanding of the individual and the society – how sanitation is understood historically, culturally, and socially. It requires an awareness of what mechanisms can be implemented to decrease value for alternative forms of defecation, add value to sanitation and toilets, and thus increase the individual demand for toilet construction and usage.
To better understand what factors increase the construction and usage of toilets, I will take an economic approach by conceptualizing a theoretical demand for toilets. This framework will help elucidate the various factors that encourage toilet adoption and act as constraints, and therefore will shed light on how sanitation reforms can be reconstructed to emphasize the factors which encourage toilet usage and to help eliminate the constraining ones. I use the model of demand for toilets proposed by Pattanayak et al. (2007); however, I have renamed certain variables in Pattanayak et al.’s (2007) model for clarification by incorporating elements of Zivin and Neidell’s (2013) health capital model.
Demand for toilets cannot be conceptualized in the exact same structure as other goods and services, which typically display diminishing marginal productivity: the first units generally have a significantly greater impact than the last few units. In contrast, in a community where the vast majority of individuals defecate publicly, an individual who constructs and uses a toilet will not experience a drastic increase in his/her health. Because public defecation impacts health via water, the individual that constructs and uses a toilet in the high-density public defecation community will still experience poor health through contaminated water, or by flies that transmit fecal matter to food and drinking water sources via his/her neighbor’s public defecation practices (Pattanayak et al., 2007). Theoretically, there must be some threshold level at which the percentage of community members using toilets has a substantial effect on health. Once this threshold is reached and bypassed, all individuals – whether or not one owns and uses a toilet – will experience health improvements, with improvements continuously increasing in the number of adopters. Shuval et al. (1981) propose such a theory: in comparison to the straight-line relationship – each incremental sanitation improvement creates the same improvement in health status – or the hyperbolic relationship – each sanitation improvement increases health status at a diminishing rate – Shuval et al. (1981) propose the “S” curve for the threshold-saturation theory – sanitation improvements have a drastic effect on health after a certain threshold, with health improvements negligible below the threshold and increasing at a diminishing rate above the threshold. Thus, the health of an individual depends upon the construction and usage of sanitation facilities by the entire community. In fact, Geruso and Spears (2014) in their study, “Sanitation and Health Externalities: Resolving the Muslim Mortality Paradox,” show that it is latrine use by neighbors, rather than the household’s own use of latrines, that is associated with the largest mortality gradient. Consequently, when deciding whether or not to construct and use a toilet, an (rational) individual will also consider the decisions of, or social pressure to install from others, such as the number of sanitation facilities already in use in the community, or the communal pressures from others to also install a facility. The transition away from public defecation and towards the usage of latrines or toilets produces value through a series of physical and mental health benefits. It is these all-inclusive health benefits that subsequently increase individual value, utility, and happiness. Jenkins and Curtis (2005) use qualitative data from interviews with 40 heads of households in rural Benin to help elucidate these motives and reasons for latrine adoption. Their analysis reveals 11 distinct reasons for latrine adoption, which they divide into three categories: prestige-related, wellbeing, and situational. Broadly, I will classify these three categories as health benefits, using the World Health Organization’s loose definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (World Health Organization, 2003).