Measuring Access to Basic Services in Global Cities: Descriptive and Behavioral Approaches

Abstract

There is little comparative research on access to basic services by the urban poor of the developing world. Rarer still are consistent definitions of “access,” an indicator traditionally used to simultaneously reflect costs as well as consumption. The policy fallout is that the status quo is both obscure and inconsistently measured. In practice, neither evaluation nor improvement of access is straightforward. Our study proposes a new taxonomy of infrastructure access indicators, demonstrating how the costs and benefits of service availability and use correspond to the range of conventional indices. Consistent distinctions are made between descriptive and behavioral measures, supply and demand factors, and community and household detail. These measures provide complementary data on a range of policy needs. We apply them to original survey data from Bangkok and Jakarta to explore the adequacy of urban services.