Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Public Funding of Sanitation Infrastructure: An analysis of Voter Behavior and Health Outcomes

清洁的水和下水道对经济发展至关重要。但这种卫生基础设施的提供如何受到政治机构的影响仍不得而知，尽管经典的理论结果预测，随着政府变得民主，在清洁水和下水道方面的支出将会增加。然而，这些理论论文以及大多数实证研究都集中在政府再分配上。他们忽视了一个非常真实的可能性，即对卫生基础设施的需求正在增加收入，如果是这样的话，民主可能与减少清洁水和下水道的支出有关，特别是在穷人获得投票权的情况下。使用原始数据集，这项拟议的研究试图通过研究政府对卫生基础设施的投资是如何通过扩大穷人的投票权及其对健康和死亡率的影响来解决这一问题的。数据集来自1870-1914年间的英国。19世纪的英国提供了一个宝贵的机会来测试政治机构如何影响政府在卫生基础设施上的支出。伴随工业革命而来的快速城市化使现有的卫生基础设施不堪重负，并让地方政府面临着对公共产品的新需求，而这些公共产品是他们无力应对的。这项研究利用选民规模随时间和不同城镇的变化来测试扩大选举权对卫生投资水平和死亡率的影响。该项目构建了一个新的全面的年度死亡率、卫生投资和城镇级特许经营程度的数据集。除了测试政治机构对基础设施支出的影响外，该数据集还将被用来确定卫生投资对于在此期间降低死亡率的重要性，这将揭示地方政府应对城市化带来的健康后果的能力。此外，这项研究将补充经济历史学家最近的工作，衡量和解释地方一级政府能力的增长，因此，重要的是，对卫生基础设施的投资。在项目结束时，将努力通过全球价格和收入历史小组或IPCSR公开这些数据。

Clean water and sewers are essential for economic development. But how the provision of such sanitation infrastructure is affected by political institutions remains unknown, even though classic theoretical results predict more spending on clean water and sewers as governments become democratic. However, these theoretical papers, as well as most empirical studies, focus on government redistribution. They ignore the very real possibility that demand for sanitary infrastructure is increasing in income, and if it is, then democracy could be associated with less spending on clean water and sewers, particularly when the poor get the right to vote. Using an original data set, the proposed research seeks to resolve this issue by studying how government investment in sanitation infrastructure is shaped by the extension of voting rights to the poor and its consequences for health and mortality rates.The data set comes from Britain in the years 1870-1914. Nineteenth-century Britain offers a valuable opportunity for testing how political institutions influenced government spending on sanitation infrastructure. The rapid urbanization accompanying the Industrial Revolution overwhelmed existing sanitary infrastructure, and left local governments facing new demands for public goods that they were ill-equipped to handle. The study exploits variation in the size of the electorate over time and across towns to test the effects of extending the franchise on the level of sanitary investment and mortality. This project constructs a new comprehensive annual dataset of mortality, sanitary investment and the extent of the franchise at town-level. In addition to testing the effect of political institutions on infrastructure spending, the dataset will also be used to identify the importance of sanitary investment for the decline in mortality rates during the period, which will shed light on the ability of subnational governments to counter the health consequences of urbanization. Further, the study will complement recent work by economic historians in measuring and explaining growth in government capacity at the local level and hence, importantly, investments in sanitation infrastructure. At the conclusion of the project efforts will be made to make the data publicly available through the Global Price and Incomes History group or the IPCSR.