In 1998, and in the context of the European Directives, a reform of the Portuguese rail sector was implemented, through the vertical separation of the two basic rail activities, and an access charging system with economic regulation was introduced. This study sought to understand the Portuguese...

Providing operators with objective incentives for cost efficiency and continuous improvement in the provision of public services are major concerns for regulators. Measuring efficiency empirically is complex and this complexity is accentuated when the same operator is responsible for delivering...

This paper updates the literature on water utility benchmarking studies developed worldwide, focusing on scale and scope economies. Using meta-regression analysis, the study investigates which variables from published studies influence these economies. Our analysis yields several conclusions....