This article examines problems that occurred as a result of the Queensland government's restructuring of the state's water industry from 2006 onwards. It focuses on the experience on the Gold Coast, where the forced transfer of water retail and wastewater services from the Gold Coast City...

We analyze rehabilitation investments in a regulated water industry with perfectly inelastic demand. We compare alternative organizational solutions for local provision (municipalization, corporatization and privatization), though subject to a common regulatory mechanism. We can then assess the...

The quality of governance crucially affects corporate outcomes, and may be particularly important for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) not disciplined by market competition forces. We examine the impact of board composition on the performance of companies controlled by public entities in Italy....

The decision oriented theory of the public firm (Feng, Friedrich 2013) becomes extended. The authors consider that sometimes public firms compete horizontally as well. This can be due to competition among the public owners (e.g. municipalities) considering location choices for public firms they...

For several decades public enterprises have been criticised for their poor economic performance. Many economists take it as “conventional wisdom” that publicly owned enterprises are inefficient by their very nature. This seemed to be proved by what is probably the most cited survey...

The observed two-part tariff price structure (consisting of a lump-sum price and a linear marginal price) for drinking water in Germany does not reflect the cost structure reported in the literature. Recovering marginal costs from a sample of 251 German counties, we see that there are positive...

The focus of the paper is to analyze the costs of solid waste collection by applying a well-behaved multiproduct cost function model to a sample of more than 500 Italian municipalities. Beyond shedding light on the presence and on the extent of size (or scale) economies, our aim is to...

The focus of the paper is to analyze the costs of solid waste collection by applying a well-behaved multi-product cost function model to a sample of more than 500 Italian municipalities. Beyond shedding light on the presence and on the extent of size (or scale) economies, our aim is to...