Impact evaluation of wastewater treatment works financed by EU funds on the water quality in Spain (2007-2010)

• Ignacio Moral-Arce ^[1] ; María Gorriti ^[2]
  1. [1] Instituto de Estudios Fiscales

     Instituto de Estudios Fiscales

     Madrid, España

     
  2. [2] Ministerio de Hacienda y Administraciones Públicas, Madrid, España
• Localización: Papeles de trabajo del Instituto de Estudios Fiscales. Serie economía, ISSN 1578-0252, Nº 8, 2014, págs. 7-26
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper studies the effects that wastewater treatment projects financed by EU funds have had on water quality in the years 2007-2010.Using Spanish municipalities’ data, we have made a descriptive analysis of the evolution of EU Structural funds for wastewater treatment projects. Then, we studied the impact that EU fund has had on water quality indicators by means of combining the Propensity Score Matching techniques and the difference in differences approach (DID). The first step is an estimation of a multilevel logit model that evaluates the probability that a municipality conducts a waste water treatment project using EU structural funds. Then, taking into account the PSM value we calculated the effect that the completion of such projects has on our variable of interest. The results show that the observable characteristics, both municipal and regional, have a great effect on the probability of a municipality participating in a wastewater treatment project. It is worth noting that the implementation of this type of work considerably improves the sanitation of water.