Abstract
Despite the global resolve to ensure the availability and
sustainable management of water and sanitation, several people
across the world still have very limited or no access to
basic drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services.
Therefore, this study primarily examined the effect of
public spending on WASH adoption. The moderating role
of governance quality in the nexus among public spending
and WASH adoption was equally assessed. The underlying
relationships for a global panel of 45 countries over the
2000–2022 period are unravelled with the help of the system
Generalised Method of Moments, Driscoll–Kraay robust
standard errors and the generalised least squares estimation
techniques. Results from various approaches show that public
spending has a statistically significant negative effect on
WASH adoption. Moreover, the interactive regressions show
that public spending negatively interacts with governance
to produce a negative net effect of −0.319. The underlying
negative effects are apparent when some governance thresholds
are exceeded. These thresholds are critical points that
when reached, complementary policies are needed in order
to maintain the unconditional positive effect of public spending
on WASH adoption. It follows that the complementarity
between public spending and governance is a sufficient and
necessary condition for the promotion of WASH adoption
exclusively below certain governance thresholds. Contingent
on the empirical results, policymakers are advised to
tailor public spending to more conveniently target localbased
WASH initiatives in order to limit bureaucracy and
broad-based policies. Besides, the local population should be
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and
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© 2024 The Author(s). International Social Science Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
28 ACHUO AND ASONGU
endowed with the ability to sanction elected officials when
WASH measures are not effectively implemented. Beyond the
economic and political governance consideration related to
WASH, institutional governance should also be improved at
the local level, to the extent that ensuring the respect of interactions
between the citizens and the State in the promotion of
WASH is also enforced at the local level.