Measuring the efficiency of water utilities: a cross-national comparison between Portugal and Italy (original) (raw)
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This study explores the impact of different ownership types on the efficiency of water utilities. Theories and evidence have shown a puzzling relationship between ownership and performance. Moreover, relatively recent contributions (Andrews et al., 2011) have argued that this relationship can be further convoluted by the effect of organisational and environmental variables. The current study aims to contribute to this literature by providing some empirical evidence for Italy, by proposing a methodology that combines nonparametric efficiency estimation and cluster analysis. Our main findings indicate that privately owned utilities indirectly controlled by a public organisation reach the highest level of efficiency but, when size and geographical location enter the analysis, ownership has a stronger significant effect on efficiency, and mixed utilities gain higher cost efficiency. Therefore, we may conclude that administrative reforms about privatisation and the institutional setting should consider a set of variables that characterise each individual organisation.
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This study explores the impact of ownership types on efficiency of Italian water utilities. Theories and evidence have shown a puzzling relationship between ownership and performance. Moreover, a recent study argues that this relationship can be further complicated by the effect of organisational and environmental variables. The current study aims to contribute to the debate about the impact of ownership structure on efficiency by including the effect of size and geographical location combining efficiency (obtained via nonparametric methods) with cluster analysis. The results show that ownership does not have a significant effect on efficiency per se; however the combination of size and geographical location provides interesting insights on the difference observed in the efficiency. Therefore, the paper argues that administrative reforms for institutional settings should consider a set of variables that characterise each organisation.
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Eficiency of Water Utilities: Does Local Public Ownership Matter? Evidence from Italy
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In the last decades the governance of local public services has been the focus of administrative reforms to pursue an improvement in the eciency and productivity levels coping with increasing constrains in nancial re- sources. In this scenario, changes in governance and ownership of local public services shave occurred with a shift from public to private owner- ship (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). Our paper focuses on the eciency analysis of Italian water utilities. The attention toward this type of utili- ties is motivated by two reasons: rstly, in recent years the Italian water industry has been at the centre of debate about the possibility of priva- tization; secondly in 2011 the change in the regulation conferred powers to the Italian regions to decide on which administrative body should be the provider of local water services. In addition, the law does not exclude that regions themselves could exercise this power. Thus, the evaluation of the eciency and productivity analysis ...
This article reports the outcome of a performance study of the water service provision industry in Italy. The study evaluates the efficiency of 21 "private or public-private" equity and 32 "public" equity water service operators and investigates controlling factors. In particular, the influence that the operator typology and service management nature -private vs. public -has on efficiency is assessed. The study employed a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis methodology. In the first stage, the operational efficiency of water supply operators is calculated by implementing a conventional BCC DEA model, that uses both physical infrastructure and financial input and output variables to explore economies of scale. In the second stage, bootstrapped DEA and Tobit regression are performed to estimate the influence that a number of environmental factors have on water supplier efficiency. The results show that the integrated water provision industry in Italy is characterized by operational inefficiencies of service operators, and scale and agglomeration economies may have a not negligible effect on efficiency. In addition, the operator typology and its geographical location affect efficiency.
Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 2020
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This paper computes input-specific scores of technical efficiency for a sample of water utilities located in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia. In addition, differences in efficiency between different operating environments are investigated. Concerning the debate about ownership and efficiency, we find that privately owned companies outperform public utilities in their management of labour. Furthermore, technical efficiency is found to be greater among firms located in highly populated areas and for utilities providing water services to tourist municipalities. Finally, no empirical evidence supporting the greater technical efficiency of consortia of water utilities, a managerial strategy strongly encouraged by regional politicians, is found.