from estimates of the capital stock per customer for an efficient firm plus information on operation and maintenance costs and efficiency levels (in terms of losses and employees) for the period 2010–15, derived from the IBNET data set. A total cost-reflective tariff that covers both operating expenditure (OPEX) and capital expenditure (CAPEX) (defined as CRT) and a costreflective tariff that covers only OPEX (defined as CRTopex) are estimated.<sup>5</sup>

# **2.2 Descriptive statistics**

Table 1 presents some descriptive statistics of the rates of households connected to piped water in each country analyzed; countries are listed in descending order by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. These statistics are country-wide, and outline the areas covered by each household survey and not only those served by utility companies.<sup>6</sup> Column 1 shows the proportion of all households (regardless of whether they have access or not) that report using piped water as their main source of drinking water.<sup>7</sup> Column 2 shows the same figure for rural households, column 3 for urban households, and column 4 for poor households. Despite wide variations in coverage rates across countries, connection levels are consistently higher among urban households than both rural and poor ones.<sup>8</sup> The African countries in our sample with the lowest GDP per capita (Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, and Uganda; column 5) also have the lowest connection rate, at below 5 percent among rural and poor households. Bangladesh, a relatively poor country, presents a similar pattern. Nigeria’s connection rates are quite low given the country’s income per capita, but disparities among different population segments are smaller. The three Latin American countries have substantially higher connection rates, between 70 and 95 percent for the general population, and around 50 percent or over for rural and poor households. Vietnam falls in the middle, with a connection rate of 53 percent for the whole population, and reaching 70 percent for urban households.

**Table 1. Households connected to piped water**

|Country|Househol|ds connecte<br>(piped wat|d to network<br>er) (%)|water|<br>GDP per capita in<br>USD PPP 2016|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||(1)|(2)|(3)|(4)|(5)|
||Total|Rural|Urban|Poor||
|Panama|93.2|80.4|98.7|84.6|21,335|
|Jamaica|69.7|49.0|88.1|56.2|8,180|
|El Salvador|79.3|64.1|88.0|67.9|7,990|
|Vietnam<sup>a</sup>|53.0|28.8|70.2|50.4|5,838|
|Nigeria|13.6|9.9|19.0|10.5|5,435|

5 Estimated cost-reflective tariffs exclude environmental costs due to data constraints. For Ethiopia, we use averages across the 24 Sub-Saharan African countries considered in Andres et al. (2019), which excludes Ethiopia, since otherwise the values for cost-reflective tariffs in this particular country are unrealistically high.

6 For most countries, the surveys are nationally representative. In Vietnam, the survey includes only five regions: Hanoi City, Da Nang, Dak Nong, Thu Dau Mot City and Bình Dương Province, and Ho Chi Min City.

7 Country estimates might differ slightly from those of the Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) of the World Health Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), due to some minor differences in variable definitions and sources. One common difference between our computation and JMP’s is that we define a household as connected to piped water if it uses piped water as its main source of drinking water either in the dry or wet season. The JMP also includes public standpipes as part of its piped water definition in some countries such as Ethiopia and Mali, whereas we include only household connections. Thus, our figures may be easily compared against the JMP’s for household connections only. For example, figures for Ethiopia and Nigeria are slightly higher in table 1 (19.8 percent and 13.6 percent, respectively, in column 1) than those presented by the JMP (15.2 percent and 12.2 percent, respectively). 8 As one might expect, there are also wide variations across the administrative geographic areas covered by the household surveys in each country, variations that are not shown in this paper.

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