Index of Drinking Water Adequacy for the Asian Economies

An Index of Drinking Water Adequacy (referred to as IDWA-I in this paper) was first proposed in 2007 for 23 member countries of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and formed part of the Asian Water and Development Outlook (AWDO), 2007 brought out by the ADB. IDWA-I was obtained by averaging 5 separate component indicators referring to capacity to buy water, extent of resource availability, amount of water used, water quality (indicated by a proxy variable, namely the death rate due to diarrhoea) and the percentage of people with access. This paper reports the main results of IDWA-I and IDWA-II, in which we replace general access with specific access via home connection, after discovering the relatively weak correlation between the two types of access. Because of the dominating influence of the other common components, IDWA-I and IDWA-II are highly correlated indicators. The two, however, bring out diverse relative ranks for different countries.