Drinking Water and sewerage.
The World Bank began to make loans for drinking water and sewerage projects in 1961. In 1970, the Bank worked out a coopera- tive arrangement with the World Health Organization under which the latter would help find and prepare drinking water, sewerage, and storm drainage projects for the Bank. By 1974 the total of World Bank loans and IDA credits for water supply and sewerage had surpassed $1,500 million, and the annual level of new lending was run- ning about $300 million to $500 million a year. Action to improve drinking water and sanitation is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways in which to begin to improve health in the developing countries just as it was in the industrialized countries. In fact, the UN Advisory Committee on the Application of Science and Technology to Development recommended that "primarily greater attention should be given to the provision of communal water supplies of high quality. . . . In developing countries the absence or imperfection of the water supply are contributory causes to the ravages of cholera, enteric fevers, bacillary and amebic dysentery, and the all-pervading diarrhoeal diseases. It is estimated that these diseases affect no less than 500 million people each year . . ." ' This conclusion seems fairly safe to advance, but the lack of appreciation by economists of the importance of health to development has meant that little basic research has been done to measure more precisely how much of a contribution safe water, for example, might make. As Jeremy Warford has pointed out, everyone acknowledges the health benefits of piped water supply, but there is no firm statistical evidence to demonstrate what will happen in a town or region when water is made available. "[N]ot only are we unaware of the effects of improved water supply on health in monetary terms," Warford writes.
