Paper published in Project Monitoring and Reappraisal in the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade, 11th-15th May 1981 for the American Society of Civil Engineers
“The abrupt increases in the cost of energy since 1973 have had far-reaching effects, not only on global wealth distribution and world growth prospects, but also on the selection of appropriate technology in all sectors and countries’ investment plans. For the water and wastes sector, the impacts of high energy prices are generally of two types: changes in the cross-country distribution and national demand for water and waste projects caused by macroeconomic changes, and the microeconomic effects on methods of project evaluation and technology choice. This paper discusses these two aspects and concludes that in both development and industrialized countries, higher energy prices will result in a higher opportunity cost for water, thereby increasing the attractiveness of water-saving technologies.”
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Reproduced with permission of the American Society of Civil Engineers