Rainwater harvesting and households' time allocation in Mexico City

Abstract: Disparities in access to water are an undeniably important driver of inequality, across and within countries. One of the burdens of limited water access is the time that households spend fetching water. In this paper, I investigate the potential time saving impact of rain water harvesters (RWHs) in sub-urban Mexico City by following three steps. First, I consider the survey that is being carried out in connection to a project that subsidizes the installation of RWHs in households in the Mexican capital, highlighting the significant level of water distress in the region. In order to understand how RWHs could benefit households, I design a theoretical model in which households can allocate time to three alternatives to water fetching, namely work, childcare and leisure. I outline different scenarios that depend on the value of specific parameters in the model. In the last section, I use a consumption survey at the national level to estimate the impact of water access differences. The econometric results suggest a strong preference for female members of Mexican households to invest the time gained thanks to easier access to water on wage-earning activities, followed by leisure. Men, instead, would spend the additional time on leisure only. In this way, I am able to identify one of the scenarios from the theoretical part that is most likely to predict the social benefits that will accrue to Mexico City households participating in the subsidized program.