Unholy Water

The EclecticEconomist alerts us to a story in the Onion CBC News:

The United Church of Canada may ask its members to stop buying bottled water.

The
request is part of a resolution against the privatization of water
supplies that has been put before delegates at the church’s general
council this week in Thunder Bay….

"We’re against the commodification, the privatization is another way to say it, of water anyway, anywhere," [said a church leader.]

If the United Church cares about children they should reconsider their opposition.  Privatized water saves lives.  From my post, Water of Life:

…In the 1990s Argentina embarked
on one of the largest privatization campaigns in the world, including
the privatization of local water
companies covering approximately 30 percent of the country’s
municipalities.
Using the variation in ownership of water provision across time and
space generated
by the privatization process, we find that child mortality fell 8
percent in
the areas that privatized their water services and that the effect was
largest (26 percent) in the poorest areas….

That is the abstract to a very important paper, Water for Life: The Impact of the Privatization of Water Services on Child Mortality, by Sebastian Galiani, Paul Gertler and Ernesto Schargrodsky in the February 2005 issue of the JPE.  (free working paper version).

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