Person:
van den Berg, Caroline

Global Practice on Water
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Water economics, Public finance, Monitoring and evaluation
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Global Practice on Water
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Last updated: January 31, 2023
Biography
Caroline van den Berg is working as a Lead Water Economist in the World Bank’s Global Water Practice, focusing mostly on the economics of water supply, wastewater, sanitation and irrigation water services.  She has extensive experience in the preparation and implementation of investment and development policy operations, and in applied research projects – with a work experience that extends over more than 40 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.   She works on cost-benefit analysis, financial analysis, monitoring and evaluation, benchmarking of utilities, regulation and pricing, energy efficiency in water projects and public finance mostly in relation to the water sector.  She has published regularly in academic journals.  Prior to joining the World Bank, she was a research economist, financial analyst and project economist in the private sector. She earned her M.A. in macroeconomics from the Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands and a Ph.D. in spatial sciences from the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). 

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    Understanding Demand When Reforming Water Supply and Sanitation : A Case Study from Sri Lanka
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-06) van den Berg, Caroline; Yang, Jui-Chen; Gunatilake, Herath
    Many countries are weighing urgent reforms to bring safe water supply and sanitation (WSS) services to hundreds of millions of poor city dwellers. Past reforms, unfortunately, have often ignored consumer preferences and perceptions, resulting in overly optimistic projections of the revenue potential of reform projects. When revenues fall short, private partners may seek to renegotiate their contract, resulting in tariff increases and other changes that increase project costs across the board. Such situations can undermine political commitment to reforms in general and to Private Sector Participation (PSP) in particular. Understanding consumers can help avoid such situations. Different groups of consumers have distinct preferences and perceptions that may influence their decisions about new water systems. Unfortunately, studies of consumers' water-related preferences are often deferred because collecting data takes time and costs money. Often there is pressure to complete reforms quickly sometimes to take advantage of a political opportunity so the necessary research is not done. In other cases, the challenge of increasing efficiency and improving governance may seem so daunting that the specific interventions required to make reform beneficial to the poor may be overlooked or consciously deferred.
  • Publication
    The Use of Willingness to Pay Experiments : Estimating Demand for Piped Water Connections in Sri Lanka
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-01) Pattanayak, Subhrendu K.; van den Berg, Caroline; Yang, Jui-Chen; Van Houtven, George
    The authors show how willingness to pay surveys can be used to gauge household demand for improved network water and sanitation services. They do this by presenting a case-study from Sri Lanka, where they surveyed approximately 1,800 households in 2003. Using multivariate regression, they show that a complex combination of factors drives demand for service improvements. While poverty and costs are found to be key determinants of demand, the authors also find that location, self-provision, and perceptions matter as well, and that subsets of these factors matter differently for subsamples of the population. To evaluate the policy implications of the demand analysis, they use the model to estimate uptake rates of improved service under various scenarios-demand in subgroups, the institutional decision to rely on private sector provision, and various financial incentives targeted to the poor. The simulations show that in this particular environment in Sri Lanka, demand for piped water services is low, and that it is unlikely that under the present circumstances the goal of nearly universal piped water coverage is going to be achieved. Policy instruments, such as subsidization of connection fees, could be used to increase demand for piped water, but it is unclear whether the benefits of the use of such policies would outweigh the costs.
  • Publication
    Water Markets, Demand and Cost Recovery for Piped Water Supply Services : Evidence from Southwest Sri Lanka
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-06) Nauges, Celine; van den Berg, Caroline
    In many countries water supply is a service that is seriously underpriced, especially for residential consumers. This has led to a call for setting cost recovery policies to ensure that the tariffs charged for water supply cover the full cost of providing for the service. Yet, the question arises on how consumers will react to such price increases. The authors illustrate the impact of price increases on consumption of piped water through a study of the demand for water of piped and non-piped households using cross-sectional data from 1,800 households in Southwest Sri Lanka. The (marginal) price elasticity is estimated at -0.74 for households exclusively relying on piped water, and at -0.69 for households using piped water but supplementing their supply with other water sources, with no significant differences between income groups. Those households that depend on non-piped water sources have a time cost elasticity (as a proxy for price elasticity) of only -0.06. The authors discuss the implications of these results in terms of pricing policy.