Socioeconomic factors affecting domestic water demand in Israel

Abstract

Income, or its surrogate, has been an important predictor of residential water use. In the case of Israel, other socioeconomic variables not collinear with income have been found to be valid predictors and increase the sensitivity of residential forecasting models. For a sample of 1892 residences in Israel, aside from income those variables found to explain a significant portion of the variation in residential water use were number of persons per family, cultural origin, education and age of the head of the household, and number of rooms per household.