that the effect of _Voice_ on basic sanitation service access and use exclude a zero effect.

Columns 3–6 in Table 5, present the results for urban and rural areas. The coefficient estimates on _Voice_ is fairly large and statistically significant at least at the 10% level in all columns. A unit increase in voice and accountability causes an increase in access to sanitation by approximately 13 and 32 percentage points in urban and rural areas, respectively. The estimates suggest that the relationship between _Voice_ and sanitation access is stronger in rural areas than in urban areas. Similar to the results for the full population, Panel B of the Table shows that the coefficient of the instrumental variable is large and statistically significant. The effective F-statistic for the even numbered columns (i.e., Columns 4 and 6) are smaller than the rule-of-thumb of 10. Hence, we again rely on the AR confidence interval for inference. The interval does not include a zero. We can therefore conclude that _Voice_ has an unambiguous positive impact on broadening access to sanitation in the developing countries we consider. This implies that improvements in the populace’s ability to actively participate in selecting governments, freedom of speech through protests, and strong and free press can help broaden access to sanitation in developing countries via the mechanisms previously discussed.

5.3 THE RURAL-URBAN GAP As discussed earlier, there exists a significant rural-urban gap in access to sanitation in developing countries (Table 6). The results in Table 5 provides a preamble for the question of whether _Voice_ can serve as an effective vehicle to help close this gap in access to sanitation. Specifically, Table 5 showed that while _Voice_ has positive effect on access to sanitation in both rural and urban areas, the effect is generally larger in rural areas than in urban areas. In this section, we investigate whether _Voice_ can help close this gap by regressing the gap, measured as the difference between the share of rural population with sanitation access and the share of urban population with sanitation access, on _Voice_ .

**Table 6:** The effect of voice on the rural-urban gap

||(1)|(2)|
|---|---|---|
|_Panel A: OLS estimates_|||
|Voice and accountability|-0.029|-0.011|
||(0.024)|(0.023)|
|_Panel B: Two stage least squares estimates_|||
|Voice and accountability|-0.1833<sup>_∗∗∗_</sup><br>(0.057)|-0.195<sup>_∗∗_</sup><br>(0.082)|
|AR confdence intervals|[-0.344,-0.094]|[-0.503,-0.082]|
|Regional dummies|Yes|Yes|
|Other controls|No|Yes|
|Number of countries|72|72|
|First-stage Effective_F-_statistic|14.28|11.17|
|First-stage_F-_statistic|22.84|8.68|
|Kleibergen & Paap (2006)test(pvalue)|0.009|0.007|

_Notes:_ *** _p <_ 0.01, ** _p <_ 0.05, * _p <_ 0.1. Robust standard errors in parentheses. AR confidence intervals correspond to the 95% Anderson-Rubin confidence intervals robust against weak instruments and heteroscedasticity. The _p_ -values of the Kleibergen & Paap (2006) test correspond to a test in which the null hypothesis is that the equation is underidentified, and under the null, the statistic is distributed as chisquared. _The dependent variable is rural-urban gap in access to sanitation_ Table 6 presents the results. We include the estimations from the OLS estimator for completeness. Two findings stand out. First, the estimates reveal that that there is a strong, negative, and statistically significant effect of _Voice_ on the rural-urban gap. Increased _Voice_ is likely to increase sanitation access and use in rural areas faster than it will 13