The paper deals with the effects of local governments' interference with business affairs of publicly owned utilities. A partial model is presented to illustrate the consequences of "democratic control" for the public managers' effort and the efficiency of local public production. To check the...

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...

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...

Managers of public water companies present themselves and are seen as public servants maximizing public welfare. Because water is rarely allocated through market mechanisms, this maximization requires that managers cooperate in a bureaucratic version of a social dilemma. Members of the...

The function of communal water supply utilities is to provide consumers with high quality drinking water in sufficient quantities. On the other hand communal wastewater disposal utilities have to dispose the wastewater. In addition to this water prices and wastewater charges shall also give...

This paper is part of a subset of working papers within the Environment Working Paper series, presenting research on the enabling environment for investment in water security. The subset includes country and regional projects aimed at pilot testing the Scorecard, designed to assess the enabling...

This report outlines results from the initial pilot-testing of a Scorecard to assess the enabling environment for investment in water security, referred to as "the Scorecard”. Developed in collaboration with the Asian Development Bank and partners, the Scorecard aims to identify conditions for...

I develop and test three theories of public ownership: a small markets hypothesis; a commitment hypothesis; and a patronage hypothesis. The empirical analysis employs a cross section of 1,274 public and private gas companies operating in 1911. With these data, I find the following patterns: gas...

The question non longer is if more competition should be introduced in the German water and sewerage sector. The issue rather is what kind of competition ought to be implemented. There are mainly three different approaches: Competition in the Market; Competition for the Market and the...