Paying for Water: Water Pricing and Equity in England and Wales Author(s): Karen J. Bakker Source: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2001), pp. 143-164 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3650665 . Accessed: 17/08/2011 17:04 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Blackwell Publishing and The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. http://www.jstor.org Paying for water: water pricing and equity in England and Wales Karen J Bakker Over the past three decades, the business of water supply in England and Wales has been gradually transforming from the supply of a service to citizens, to the sale of a commodity to customers. The paper provides a genealogy of concepts of efficiency and equity in water regulation over the past thirty years, prior to evaluating the implications for water consumers of one aspect of this process - the shift away from policies prioritizing inter- and intra-regional equalization (implying a principle of social equity) towards policies prioritizing economic efficiency (implying a principle of economic equity) in water charging.