The impact of water quality on health: evidence from the drinking water infrastructure program in rural China

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of a major water quality improvement program in rural China on the health of adults and children. Using panel data covering about 4500 households from 1989 to 2006, I estimate the impact of introducing village-level access to water from water plants on various measures of health. The regression results imply that the illness incidence of adults decreased by 11 percent and their weight-for-height increased by 0.835kg/m, and that children's weight-for-height and height itself both rose by 0.446kg/m and 0.962cm respectively, as a result of the program. And these estimates are quite stable across different robustness checks.