Making the poor pay

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In poor countries, lack of clean drinking water means that 1.6 million people, most young children, die of diarrhea. But adding a special bleach solution called Clorin to a jerrycan of water can make it safe to drink. This raises the controversial question: Should some of the poorest people in the world be charged for Clorin?

Many nongovernmental organizations argue that when you hand out something for free, it won’t be valued or used. And recent research seems to validate this view. In the experiment, survey teams went door to door in Zambia. They offered Clorin at a random price to each household. Households that agreed to buy at that price were then offered a random discount.

When survey teams returned to the homes a couple of weeks later and tested water supplies, they discovered that people who had agreed to a higher original price were more likely to be actually using their Clorin. (The discounted price didn’t have a meaningful effect on usage.) The conclusion: Higher prices channel the product to households more likely to use it in the first place, and screen out those who wouldn’t be intensive, regular users.

Of course, one is left wondering, what about those people who turned down the original offer? What if some of them really wanted to use Clorin, but simply couldn’t afford it? Perhaps any profit from selling it to the richest of the poor could be somehow used to subsidize it for the poorest of the poor. In all, it’s a difficult ethical question that applies to everything from charging people school fees for their children’s education to making them pay for antimalarial mosquito nets and antiretroviral drugs.