Eficiency of Water Utilities: Does Local Public Ownership Matter? Evidence from Italy (original) (raw)

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 ...