Municipal solid waste collection fee exemptions in Accra are allocated through means-test cutoffs that classify households as indigent or liable. The framework treats the exemption threshold as a discontinuity in the effective price of collection, and it specifies how households near the cutoff may adjust disposal behaviour through income reporting, site substitution and informal negotiation with waste pickers. Because no household-level data on Accra's exemption programme are available for analysis, the paper does not report empirical estimates. Instead, it formalises the threshold as a regression discontinuity design, states the identifying assumptions under which a local average treatment effect would be interpretable, and derives the conditions under which bunching in the income-reporting distribution would indicate strategic responses to the cutoff. The paper also reports a secondary analysis of a real DHS Program indicator on HIV testing absent at blood collection across 28 African countries (55 country-survey observations, 2003-2025; mean 0.967, SD 1.488), used here only to illustrate the descriptive fragility of cross-country service indicators and not as evidence about waste collection. The contribution is a transferable framework that links means-test design to environmental behaviour through a price-discontinuity mechanism, together with an explicit statement of what data would be required to test it.
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Gyamfi et al. (2026) studied this question.
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