Traditionally, water policy has focused on coordinating the public effort required to fuel economic growth by supplying water services demanded as a result of the progress in the many areas of the economy. Under this supply-oriented paradigm, population growth and the improvement of living...

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...

Many US municipalities confront serious challenges due to aging water and wastewater infrastructure. Many systems require immediate repairs, upgrades, and replacement, but available funding is scarce. Readily available low-interest financing is of great help to such municipalities. The Water...

This study explores the impact of different ownership types on the efficiency of the provision of water utilities. Theories and evidence have shown a puzzling relationship between ownership and performance. Moreover, relatively recent contributions (Andrews et al., 2011) have argued that this...

This study provides a comprehensive efficiency analysis of water service providers in six countries in the Central American region. Pressures for sector reform have stimulated interest in identifying and understanding the factors that can contribute to network expansion, improved service...

This paper estimates economies of scale and scope for 55 major Australian urban utilities over the period 2005/06 to 2008/09. The models used to specify operating and capital costs as a function of chemical and microbiological compliance, water losses, water quality and service, water main...

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...

Cross-country comparisons avoid the unsteady equilibrium in which regulators have to balance between economies of scale and a sufficient number of remaining comparable utilities. By the use of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), we compare the efficiency of the drinking water sector in the...