Investimento Privado em Infraestrutura de Saneamento Básico

Abstract

The research is structured into three chapters, focusing on the assessment of the causal effects of private investment on water and sewage indicators in Brazilian municipalities. The first chapter conducts a descriptive analysis exploring the historical evolution of sanitation regulations in Brazil. This analysis provides details on basic sanitation data, mainly in relation to contracts with private providers. The second chapter examines the effectiveness of private investment in aspects such as water supply and sewage treatment for the period from 2002 to 2018. For this analysis, the empirical methodology known as Difference-in-Differences is adopted, employing the estimator developed by Sun; Abraham (2021) for multiple periods, with data collected at the municipal level due to the heterogeneous treatment among the treated. The findings demonstrate that the effectiveness of private investment depends on the type of contract; while exclusive contracts for water investment show significant improvements in access to and consumption of water, contracts that include both services indicate negative effects on average per capita consumption. This suggests the importance of specific strategies for each investment area. On the other hand, exclusive sewage investment contracts did not show statistically significant results. The third and final chapter examines the causal impact of private investment on water quality, adopting the empirical strategy of Bayesian Structural Time Series (BSTS) for causal inference. The findings of this chapter demonstrate that private investment significantly contributed to improvements in water quality and distribution to the population in the analyzed states.