Policies to promote privatisation in developing-country infrastructure gained momentum in the early 1990s as donors grew increasingly frustrated with efforts to strengthen public sector services that continued to fail. The strategy was intended to bring both finance and efficiency to ailing...

This paper investigates the determinants of profit change over the period 1991-2008 for the Water and Sewerage Companies (WaSCs) in the English and Welsh water and sewerage industry. We firstly apply an input oriented profit decomposition approach following the approach of De Witte & Saal...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of regulation in the financial performance of the Water and Sewerage companies (WaSCs) in England and Wales. We apply a panel index approach across WaSCs over time to decompose unit-specific (temporal) index number based profitability growth as a...

Given the ubiquitous scarcity of resources an economic approach is necessary in order to determine an optimal strategy of adaptation to climate change. In this paper we develop an economic framework for the study of adaptation which allows us to distinguish between decentralized adaptation by...

Using the budget-based scheme approach developed by Kirby et.al. (1991) and Reichelstein (1992), this paper establishes the optimal policy function in order to control hidden actions from managers of Public Water Utilities (PWU) regarding investments that deviate from the Optimized Business Plan...

We study the strategic utilization of storage in imperfect electricity markets. We apply a game-theoretic Cournot model to the German power market and analyze different counterfactual and realistic cases of pumped hydro storage. Our main finding is that both storage utilization and...

We analyze the optimal investment strategy of a monopolist which has subscribed a concession contract to provide a public utility, i.e. water service. We present a strategic model in which a monopolist chooses both the timing of the investment and the capacity. We focus not only on the value of...

In view of the increasing competition for water, there is a risk that particularly the rural poor will increasingly face difficulties in meeting their water needs for domestic and productive purposes. Based on a questionnaire survey carried out during 2008 in Con Cuong district, Nghe An...

Normative ideals for 'good water management' have proliferated the last twenty years. However, evidence of effective implementation is scarce. This paper analyzes cases from India, the Mekong and Denmark where attempts have been made to translate water management ideals into practice. The...

The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly, in 1997, the sector association started with a voluntary benchmarking aimed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Secondly, merger activity arose. This paper develops a tailored...