Person:
Joseph, George
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Impact evaluation,
Applied microeconomics
Degrees
Departments
Global Practice on Water, The World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
June 26, 2023
Biography
George Joseph is a Senior Economist with the Water Global Practice of the World Bank, Washington, DC. His research interests are centered on development economics and behavioral and applied microeconomics. He received his PhD in economics from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and an MA in economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 11
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Publication
Water and Sanitation in Dhaka Slums: Access, Quality, and Informality in Service Provision
(Taylor and Francis, 2020-07-16)Slum populations are commonly characterized to have poorly developed water and sanitation systems and speculated to access services through informal channels. However, there are limited representative profiles of water and sanitation services in slums, making it difficult to prioritize interventions that will make services safer for residents. This cross-sectional study examines quality and provision of access to water and sanitation services in government slums across Dhaka, Bangladesh. Access is overall high but is subject to quality issues related to safety, reliability, and liability. Services are often operated by informal middlemen at various stages of provision. -
Publication
An Assessment of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Access in Bangladesh's Community Health Clinics
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)Adequate water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in health care facilities plays a critical role in ensuring improved health care utilization and reducing disease burden due to reinfection. WASH in health facilities is now gaining momentum with the new SDG targets that governments have vowed to meet. This goal calls for a baseline examination of existing WASH conditions in health facilities. Using data collected through a census of all community health clinics in Bangladesh, this paper presents an analysis of the state of WASH in Bangladesh's rural, public health facilities highlighting that the lack of functionality of WASH facilities is a widespread problem across the country. The paper also identifies priority areas for action when considering the prevalence of poverty and chronic undernutrition at the upazilla level. -
Publication
Impact of Salinity on Infant and Neonatal Mortality in Bangladesh
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-11)In this paper, the impact of salinity on maternal and child health in Bangladesh is analyzed using data from the Bangladesh Demographic Health Surveys. A U-shaped association between drinking water salinity and infant and neonatal mortality is found, suggesting higher mortality when salinity is very low or high. With fresh drinking water, the marginal effect of salinity measured by groundwater electricity conductivity on infant death is always negative. With brackish drinking water and slightly saline water, the negative effect is small. As drinking water becomes moderately saline, the predicted probability of infant death starts to increase, and the marginal effect becomes and remains positive. The relationship between drinking water salinity and neonatal death shows a similar pattern. Finally, freshwater with very low concentration of healthy minerals and severely saline water with very high detrimental sodium can be harmful for infant and neonatal health during pregnancy. Severe salinity needs to be addressed if the recent gains in infant and neonatal mortality are to be sustained, especially in the coastal areas of Bangladesh. -
Publication
Study of the Distributional Performance of Piped Water Consumption Subsidies in 10 Developing Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-05)This paper provides new evidence on how effectively piped water consumption subsidies are targeting poor households in 10 low- and middle-income countries around the world. The results suggest that, in these countries, existing tariff structures fall short of recovering the costs of service provision, and the resulting subsidies largely fail to achieve their goal of improving the accessibility and affordability of piped water for poor households. Instead, the majority of subsidies in all 10 countries are captured by the richest households. This is in part because the most vulnerable population segments typically face challenges in accessing and connecting to piped water services. The paper also reveals shortcomings in the design of the subsidies, which are conditional on poor households being connected to a piped network. -
Publication
Children Need Clean Water to Grow: E. Coli Contamination of Drinking Water and Childhood Nutrition in Bangladesh
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-11)Water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions are increasingly recognized as essential for improving nutritional outcomes in children. Emerging literature describes the negative effects of poor sanitation on child growth. However, limited evidence has shown a link between water quality and nutritional outcomes. Similar to poor sanitation, it is plausible that water contaminated with E. coli could affect the nutritional status of children through various possible biological pathways, such as repeated episodes of diarrhea, environmental enteropathy, parasites, or other mechanisms that inhibit nutrient uptake and absorption. This study explores the relationship between contaminated water and stunting prevalence among children younger than age five years, using unique cross-sectional data from the 2012–13 Bangladesh Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, which was one of the first nationally representative surveys to include water quality testing for E. coli. E. coli contamination in drinking water is measured at household and source points. Stunting is measured using height-for-age z-scores for children under five, where a child is considered stunted when he or she is two or more standard deviations below the median of the World Health Organization reference population. The results of multiple probit regression models indicate a 6 percent increase in the prevalence of stunting in children who are exposed to highly contaminated drinking water at household point compared with those exposed to low-to-medium contamination. When contamination is measured at the source level, the association is greater, with a 9 percent increase in the likelihood of stunting when exposed to a high level of contamination. -
Publication
Measuring Deprivations in the Slums of Bangladesh: Implications for Achieving Sustainable Development Goals
(Taylor and Francis, 2019-06-10)Approximately 880 million people, or one in four urban residents, live in slums today. While this enumeration is useful, it is not a trivial exercise to estimate slum population for a city, let alone globally, especially when the definition of a slum remains a debatable construct. To demonstrate this point empirically, we utilize a household survey from nine cities in Bangladesh and provide three different estimates of slum population based on three distinct definitions. We use a contextual definition that was adapted by the Government of Bangladesh, and two universal definitions that were adapted by the international development community. Two of the universal definitions were proposed to track progress on the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals, respectively. By applying these different definitions to the same data, we found that the Bangladeshi Government’s definition provides slum population estimates that are far lower compared to those when we apply the definitions provided by the international development community. Such underestimation could misguide policymakers who want to know the extent of the policy problem, influence what kind of policy solutions will be pursued, and directly affect how these solutions will be targeted to respective populations. -
Publication
The Next Frontier in Water Supply Service Delivery: An Assessment of the Performance of Water Sector Service Providers in Pourashavas in Bangladesh
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)Using data from the International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities, this paper on the water sector in pourashavas (municipalities) in Bangladesh provides an analysis of the trends in the water sector development over 2010–16. The main purpose of the paper is to examine the average performance of the water sector providers in the pourashavas to encourage conversation on identifying and addressing deficiencies in service performance in comparison with that in the rest of Bangladesh and the world. This analysis finds that although pourashavas perform on the lower end of the spectrum compared with the rest of Bangladesh on many indicators, the top 20 percent of the pourashavas are globally competitive on indicators of staff productivity, cost coverage, and daily per capita consumption of water. -
Publication
Multi-Hazard Groundwater Risks to the Drinking Water Supply in Bangladesh: Challenges to Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)Groundwater currently provides 98 percent of all the drinking water supply in Bangladesh. Groundwater is found throughout Bangladesh but its quality (that is, arsenic and salinity contamination) and quantity (that is, water storage depletion) vary across hydrological environments, posing unique challenges to certain geographical areas and population groups. Yet, no national-scale, multi-hazard groundwater risk maps currently exist enabling water resource managers and policy makers to identify areas that are vulnerable to public health. This paper develops, for the first time, groundwater risk maps at the national scale for Bangladesh that combine information on arsenic, salinity, and water storage, using geospatial techniques, linking hydrological indicators for water quality and quantity to construct risk maps. A range of socioeconomic variables, including access to drinking and irrigation water supplies and social vulnerability (that is, poverty), are overlaid on these risk maps to estimate exposures. The multi-hazard groundwater risk maps show that a considerable proportion of land area (5 to 24 percent under extremely high to high risks) in Bangladesh is currently under combined risk of arsenic and salinity contamination, and groundwater storage depletion. As few as 6.5 million (2.2 million poor) to 24.4 million (8.6 million poor) people are exposed to a combined risk of high arsenic, salinity, and groundwater storage depletion. The multi-hazard groundwater risk maps reveal areas and exposure of population groups to water risks posed by arsenic and salinity contamination and depletion of water storage. -
Publication
Does Arsenic-Contaminated Drinking Water Limit Early Childhood Development in Bangladesh?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-08)Arsenic contamination in shallow groundwater aquifers remains a major barrier to providing access to safe drinking water in Bangladesh. Chronic exposure to arsenic has been shown to cause serious health impacts, including various cancers, skin lesions, neurological damage, heart disease, and hypertension. Numerous epidemiological studies have shown cognitive impacts on memory, linguistic-abstraction, attention, learning, and physical ability. The neurotoxic effects of arsenic could be particularly harmful for children during their critical growth periods and have impacts on early childhood development. This study uses cross-sectional data from the nationally representative 2012-13 Bangladesh Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey to investigate the effects of arsenic contamination in drinking water on early childhood development outcomes in a sample of around 7,500 children ages 3-5 years. Early childhood development is measured in four skills domains: literacy-numeracy, physical, social-emotional, and learning using the Early Childhood Development Index. Arsenic contamination is measured in source drinking water at the cluster-level. After controlling for a range of demographic, social, and economic characteristics of households, the results show that arsenic contamination is significantly and negatively associated with the overall Early Childhood Development Index, on outcomes within the physical, social-emotional, and learning skills domains. Further, there is a clear dose-response relationship, where those children with exposure to higher concentrations of arsenic have worse developmental outcomes. -
Publication
Water and Sanitation in Dhaka Slums: Access, Quality, and Informality in Service Provision
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-08)Urban slum residents often have worse health outcomes compared with other urbanites and even their rural counterparts. This suggests that slum residents do not always benefit from the "urban advantage" of enjoying better access to health-promoting services. Limited access to water and sanitation services in slums could contribute to poor health of slum residents. In Bangladesh, these services generally are not delivered through formal utilities, but rather through well-functioning informal markets that are operated by middlemen and local providers. This paper analyzes a household survey to examine living conditions and quality of access to water and sanitation services in small-, medium-, and large-sized slums across Dhaka, Bangladesh. The analysis finds that access to water and sanitation services is overall quite high, but these services are subject to important quality issues related to safety, reliability, and liability. Although water access is nearly universal, water services are often interrupted or sometimes inaccessible. Sanitation is commonly shared, with the average ratio being 16 households to one facility. When considering fecal sludge management, the study finds that only 2 percent of these households have access to the Joint Monitoring Programme's conceptualization of "safely managed sanitation." The paper also finds strong evidence that water and sanitation services are operated by middlemen at various stages of service provision such as installation, management, and payment collection. The paper provides a snapshot of the differential quality in access to these services based on the monetary welfare level of the household. The snapshot shows that access to water and sanitation services is highly correlated to per capita household consumption levels, although quality remains low overall within slums. Overall, it is likely that the informality of water and sanitation services may exacerbate social and environmental risk factors for poor health and well-being.