Population density and per capita cost of services in Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Ecuador

What is it about?

We answered two questions: 1) Which level of municipal population density has the highest coverage of municipal services (water, sewerage, trash collection)? 2) Which level of municipal population density has the lowest per-capita cost of providing municipal services? Out answer is based on an empirical study of more than 8,500 municipalities in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Ecuador

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Why is it important?

Knowing weather density increases or decreases the cost of providing municipal services in developing countries is relevant because about a third of urban residents still lack these services; and yet cities are sprawling rapidly, even if they lack services. What is unique about our paper is that we used data from developing countries, we considered that only a share of the population is actually receiving services, and we considered that there might be an endogenous relation between government expenditure in services and population density.

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