The primary objective of this research is to estimate the willingness to pay in Ghana for reliable piped water services. Three competing economic valuation approaches are used to do this: the contingent valuation method (CVM), the hedonic pricing method (HPM) and the travel cost method (TCM). These methods allow for easy robustness tests of the estimates and serves as an improvement on previous research. Using survey data from a sample of 1,650 urban households, we obtain estimates of the willingness of households to pay every month for urban piped water services of: GHS 47.80 or US$15.25 (CVM), GHS 44.73 or US$14.27 (HPM) and GHS 22.72 or US$725 (TCM). Such sums account for 3–8% of household income. These empirical calculations are then used to inform policy choices by determining the economic viability of the participation of the private sector in the water sector in Ghana.

这项研究的主要目的是估计在加纳为可靠的自来水服务付费的意愿。三种竞争性的经济估值方法可用于此目的：或有估值法（CVM），享乐定价法（HPM）和旅行成本法（TCM）。这些方法可以方便地对估计值进行鲁棒性测试，并且可以作为对先前研究的改进。使用对1,650个城市家庭的抽样调查数据，我们得出的家庭每月愿意为城市自来水服务付费的估计值是：GHS 47.80或15.25美元（CVM），GHS 44.73或14.27美元（HPM）和GHS 22.72或725美元（TCM）。这些款项占家庭收入的3–8％。