Piped Water Access, Child Health and the Complementary Role of Education: Panel Data Evidence from South Africa

Abstract

This study establishes the causal impact of piped water access on child health in rural South Africa (2008–2015) through the use of a panel dataset and a quasi-experimental sample space. By employing an ordinal measure of child health as the dependent variable within linear fixed effects, logit, ordinal probit, and propensity-score matched linear as well as non-linear Difference-in-Difference, it is demonstrated that positive health benefits for children with access to piped water are observed if and only if the minimum level of educational attainment of the primary-caregiver is equal to or greater than seven years. This finding of complementarity is demonstrated to be a function of an individual’s (in)capacity to evaluate water quality: people below this threshold suffer from a piped water bias, place insufficient weight on the observable characteristics of water when determining water quality, and are subsequently less likely to treat piped water preceding consumption.