Small-Scale Rural Water Supply and Development: Historical Experience of Korea

After the Korean War, Korean government began to make investments on (largescale) water purification plants for clean and safe water supply. But their introduction was mostly limited to urban areas due to lack of economic validity in rural areas. Instead, the government began to install small-scale water supply system in rural areas since the late 1960s. Using the historical experience, this paper investigates the effects of small-scale water supply interventions on health and human capital formation in the long-term perspectives. First, exploiting the timing and geographic variations of small-scale water facilities, we estimate that the intervention substantially reduced the incidence of typhoid fevers. Second, we compare educational attainments of cohorts born in rural areas before and after small-scale facilities were introduced by using cohort samples constructed from the 1995, 2000, 2010, and 2015 Korean population censuses. We found that early-life exposure to the intervention was beneficial to human capital formation.