Water affordability challenges in Latin America and the Caribbean: Accounting for coping costs due to reliance on multiple, non-exclusive sources
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Standard water affordability measures that only account for expenditure on piped water are unlikely to adequately capture the situation of all users in developing countries, who often experience water service quality issues and must rely on coping strategies. Our analysis establishes a foundational framework for systematically incorporating coping costs into assessing affordability metrics. Moreover, we propose adjusting these metrics based on normative judgments regarding the necessity of these coping strategies. We exploit nationally representative household-level data from 18 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, providing, for the first time, a regional perspective on water affordability We show that when coping costs, which disproportionately impact individuals in the lowest 20% income bracket, are considered, the share of income spent on water significantly exceeds conventionally accepted benchmarks. While our analysis does not reveal substantial differences between adjusted and unadjusted water affordability, our approach may yield more pronounced disparities in other developing countries. These findings, complemented by our identification of characteristics associated with water affordability challenges, provide relevant information for shaping policies aimed at guaranteeing safe and affordable access to water for all.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it