Enhancing Efficiency of Water Supply - Product Market Compoetition versus Trade

This paper analyses welfare gains in the piped water industry when introducing competition or trade between local utilities. The connection of neighbouring networks can be used for both, voluntary cross border trade and product market competition by common carriage. Using a game theoretic model we show that common carriage induces stronger production incentives for inefficient suppliers. This implies that production efficiency but also retail price tend to be lower than with trade. The net effect regarding welfare depends on the efficiency differential. At higher cost differentials welfare is higher under competition ? even in a lower bound benchmark case without regulation.