The Sewer Test: What a Nation’s Plumbing Reveals About Its Real Power

Why sanitation measures how well a state works, not how much power it wields

When people rank the world's powers, they reach for the big, dramatic numbers: GDP, defense budgets, aircraft carriers, nuclear warheads. Almost nobody looks at the sewers.

That is a mistake. Collecting, moving, treating and safely disposing of the waste of tens or hundreds of millions of people is one of the hardest jobs a government does. It takes money, engineering, long-range planning, and above all the institutional discipline to maintain buried infrastructure for generations after the ribbon-cutting. A country that does it well has shown something real about itself.

So does good sanitation go hand in hand with great-power status? The intuitive answer is yes. The data says something more interesting: sanitation is an excellent measure of how efficiently a state works, but a weak measure of whether it is a great power. Understanding why tells you a lot about how national power actually works.

What "Safely Managed" Sanitation Means

The standard yardstick comes from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP), which tracks sanitation in nearly every country. Its top tier, "safely managed" sanitation, means a household uses an improved toilet not shared with other households, and that the waste is either safely disposed of on site or carried away and treated.¹

That last condition matters. Having a flush toilet is not enough. If the sewer dumps raw sewage into a river, it does not count. The measure captures the whole chain, from the bathroom to the treatment plant.

By the JMP's latest report, 58% of the world's population had safely managed sanitation in 2024, up from 48% in 2015. Coverage was 66% in urban areas and 49% in rural areas.²

The Numbers: Where the Powers Actually Rank

Here is how a range of countries compared in 2024. I have added a rough, informal label for each country's place in the international pecking order.

Country	Safely managed sanitation (2024)	Rough power status
Singapore	100.0%	Small state
Switzerland	99.7%	Small state
South Korea	99.3%	Middle power
Japan	99.2%	Major power
United Kingdom	97.8%	Major power
United States	97.0%	Superpower
Germany	96.8%	Major power
France	90.0%	Major power
China	68.9%	Great power
India	62.8%	Rising power
World	58.5%	—
Russia	58.2%	Great power
Brazil	55.0%	Regional power

Source: WHO/UNICEF JMP estimates for 2024. The power-status labels are my own informal shorthand, not data.

Two things jump out.

First, the top of the list is not the list of great powers. Singapore and Switzerland lead the world, and neither is a great power by any definition. Excellent sanitation is clearly possible without great-power status.

Second, two of the world's three leading military powers sit in the middle of the pack. China is at about 69%. Russia, a nuclear superpower with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, sits at 58%, essentially the global average and below India. Great-power status is clearly possible without excellent sanitation.

If sewage tracked power closely, neither of those things would be true.

The Russia Puzzle

Russia deserves a closer look, because it is often the subject of lazy jokes about outhouses, and the real picture is more instructive than the jokes.

A 2018 Rosstat survey generated headlines that roughly one in five Russians lived without sewerage, and a widely shared English-language story turned that into "no indoor plumbing."³ That framing conflated two different things: having an indoor toilet and being connected to a central sewer.

Rosstat's 2024 survey of about 60,000 households separates them:⁴

• 91.8% of Russian homes have a toilet inside the dwelling
• 77.1% are connected to centralized sewerage
• 6.2% use septic tanks or similar individual systems
• 13.7% drain to cesspits

Set that beside the JMP figure of 58% for safely managed sanitation, and you see a staircase: nearly everyone has a toilet, three-quarters are on a sewer, but well under two-thirds have waste handled to the safely managed standard. The most likely explanation is that a good deal of what Russia's sewers collect is not treated, or not reported as treated, to the standard the JMP requires. Much of that network dates from the Soviet era; building pipes and maintaining treatment are two different achievements. For more information, please see: Russia: Guns Over Sewer Pipes

That distinction, between building and maintaining, is the heart of the matter. Even the United States is not immune. A 2022 global survey of wastewater infrastructure noted that America has more treatment plants than any other nation, yet the American Society of Civil Engineers had rated U.S. wastewater infrastructure a D+ in 2017 because of poor maintenance.⁵ ASCE's 2025 report card still graded it D+, unchanged since 2017, even as the overall U.S. infrastructure grade rose to its highest level ever. ASCE pointed to a large funding gap, a slowing rate of pipe and plant renewal, and rising collection-system failures.⁶ Past investment is no guarantee of present performance.

Why India's Numbers Look Upside Down

One quirk in the data will catch the sharp-eyed reader. In some developing countries, rural sanitation can score better than urban sanitation on the JMP measure. That sounds backward, but it follows from the definition. A simple rural pit latrine that safely contains waste on site can count as safely managed, while a city sewer that collects waste and dumps it untreated into a river does not. The lesson: piping waste away is only half the job, and sometimes the less impressive half.

Does Wealth Explain It?

Partly. A 2022 study by Sangeet Adhikari and Rolf Halden at Arizona State University compiled data on more than 109,000 wastewater treatment plants in 129 countries. It found that access to centralized sewage treatment was moderately correlated with GDP per capita in high-income countries (Spearman ρ = 0.5), weakly correlated in lower-middle-income countries (ρ = 0.2), and essentially uncorrelated in low-income countries (ρ = −0.04).⁷

Two cautions. The study was mainly about wastewater-based epidemiology, so these correlations are a side finding. And they relate sewage to wealth per person, not to national power. That distinction turns out to be the key to the whole puzzle.

The Key Insight: Capacity Times Scale

Political scientist Michael Beckley has argued that standard measures of national power, such as raw GDP and military spending, systematically mislead. They count a country's assets without subtracting the enormous costs of feeding, policing, protecting and serving a large population. As a result, they overstate the power of poor, populous countries like China and India. Beckley proposes measuring power in net rather than gross terms, and offers a simple proxy: GDP multiplied by GDP per capita. He reports that this approach predicts the outcomes of wars and disputes involving great powers over the past two centuries better than gross measures do.⁸

Beckley's formula points straight at the sewage puzzle. Think of national power as roughly capacity × scale:

• Capacity is how effectively a state turns resources into results per citizen. Sanitation is an excellent proxy for this.
• Scale is sheer size: population, territory, total output, total military mass.

Singapore and Switzerland have superb capacity but little scale, so they are not great powers. Russia and China have enormous scale, which lets them be great powers despite middling capacity. The United States, Japan and Germany score high on both.

On this view, sewage does not tell you whether a country is a great power. It tells you how efficient a power it is, and how much of its raw size is being eaten up by the cost of running the country.

What History Adds

History supports the idea that sanitation follows power rather than creating it. Britain was already the world's leading industrial and naval power when the "Great Stink" of 1858, a summer when the sewage-choked Thames made Parliament nearly unbearable, finally forced action. Joseph Bazalgette's sewer network, one of the great engineering achievements of the Victorian age, came after Britain's rise, not before it.

But the arrow can point the other way too. During the Boer War, the British Army rejected so many working-class recruits on physical grounds that the government set up an Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration. Its terms of reference explicitly cited the high rate of recruit rejections.⁹ The resulting 1904 report helped spur a generation of public-health and welfare reforms.¹⁰ A state that neglects the basic health of its people eventually finds the cost showing up where it hurts most: in its ability to field an army.

So the relationship runs both ways, with a lag. Power and wealth make good sanitation possible, and over time, poor sanitation and public health quietly tax a nation's power.

Conclusion: The Mundane Measure

The sewer test does not crown great powers. Russia proves that a country can project military power across continents while a large share of its sewage goes inadequately treated, and Singapore proves that flawless infrastructure does not make you a major player.

What the sewer test does reveal is something military parades and GDP rankings hide: how well a state converts its resources into functioning everyday life. A great power with poor sanitation is carrying a hidden cost on its balance sheet. Its raw size may be impressive, but more of that size is consumed simply keeping the country running, and less is left over for projecting power abroad.

That makes sanitation a useful warning light. When a country's military ambitions outpace its ability to deliver basic services at home, the gap is worth watching. It may be stronger on paper than in practice.

A natural next step would be to combine sanitation with other mundane indicators, such as reliable electricity, clean drinking water, road maintenance and garbage collection, into a broader index of state capacity. Political scientists have long studied versions of this idea, sometimes under the name "infrastructural power." The humble sewer may be one of its most honest gauges.

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Notes

1. UNICEF, "Sanitation," UNICEF Data (definition of the JMP sanitation service ladder and the "safely managed" standard). data.unicef.org ↩
2. WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme, Progress on Household Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene 2000–2024: Special Focus on Inequalities (August 2025). washdata.org ↩
3. Radio Svoboda, report on Rosstat's living-conditions survey and public reaction to the share of Russians without sewerage (Russian). svoboda.org ↩
4. Rosstat 2024 survey results as reported by Mail.ru (citing RBC), "Россияне стали ближе к канализации" (Russian), vfokuse.mail.ru; and Brian McDonald, "Do Russians have toilets?" (Substack, 2025), for the 91.8% indoor-toilet figure, substack.com. ↩
5. Sangeet Adhikari and Rolf U. Halden, "Opportunities and Limits of Wastewater-Based Epidemiology for Tracking Global Health and Attainment of UN Sustainable Development Goals," Environment International 163 (2022): 107217 (discussion section, citing ASCE's 2017 Infrastructure Report Card). doi:10.1016/j.envint.2022.107217 ↩
6. American Society of Civil Engineers, 2025 Report Card for America's Infrastructure (March 2025), Wastewater and overall grades. infrastructurereportcard.org; see also "Poor grades continue for U.S. water sector in new infrastructure report card," ES&E Magazine (2025), esemag.com. ↩
7. Adhikari and Halden, "Opportunities and Limits of Wastewater-Based Epidemiology," Environment International 163 (2022): 107217 (results section). doi:10.1016/j.envint.2022.107217 ↩
8. Michael Beckley, "The Power of Nations: Measuring What Matters," International Security 43, no. 2 (Fall 2018): 7–44. doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00328 ↩
9. Great Britain, Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, vol. 1 (London: HMSO, 1904), terms of reference. Wellcome Collection ↩
10. Bentley B. Gilbert, "Health and Politics: The British Physical Deterioration Report of 1904," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 39 (1965): 143–153. Wellcome Collection record ↩