In this paper, we investigate productivity growth in 55 major Australian urban water utilities using nonparametric frontier techniques over the period 2005/06 to 2008/09. The five outputs included in the analysis are chemical and microbiological compliance, and the inverses of real loses per...

Environmental factors add complexity to the comparison between specific activities or entire entities. Decision making units with an inferior performance are tempted to invoke that their organization is different from the others in the data set. By reinterpreting and extending the metafrontier...

Germany's water supply industry is characterized by a multitude of utilities and widely diverging prices, possibly resulting from structural differences beyond the control of firms' management, but also from inefficiencies. In this article we use Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier...

This paper extends two different metafrontier models proposed by O'Donnell et al. (2008) and Huang et al. (2014) to the input-oriented distance functional form which has been mentioned by O'Donnell et al. (2008, p250) but has not been done so far partly due to endogenous problem. As noted by...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate levels of efficiency of China's urban water utilities and to consider its implications for regulatory policy design. To that end, several different stochastic frontier models which assume distinct assumptions on the features of efficiency term are applied...

The activities of the water companies in Russia are regulated in order to overcome market failures caused by regional monopolization, information asymmetries and the need to find a balance between the interests of consumers and company objectives for its normal functioning and development. In...

The Italian water sector has encompassed major changes since mid‐90s when law 96/94 has entered into force. Next to private participation, integration of services and growth in production scales, the reform was intended to revolutionize the traditional financial model almost fully based on...

When benchmarking production units by non-parametric methods like data envelopment analysis (DEA), an assumption has to be made about the returns to scale of the underlying technology. Moreover, it is often also relevant to compare the frontiers across samples of producers. Until now, no exact...