In March 2000 Bucharest entered into a concession contract for its water utility with the aim of turning around the utility's faltering performance. Under the private operator the utility has raised service quality above Romanian standards and toward Western European levels. By 2008 efficiency...

During the 1980s and 1990s the Chilean water and sanitation sector underwent deep reforms so that private capital could finance the huge investments needed to achieve universal service. The regulatory framework put into place cleared the way for massive private equity. But users have also paid...

This note highlights the wide variation in performance on key indicators: unaccounted-for water, labor costs, the working ratio, service coverage, water prices and connection costs, and continuity of service. As governments struggle with rising health care costs, public-private partnerships in...

The design of regulation for water supply and sanitation (WSS) services has tended to follow a check-box approach - diagnose the need, prescribe an independent regulator or similar model (often developed in a different sector or country), and hope for the best. This approach has not always...

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...

This paper aims to analyse the price regulation method and performance of the water industry in Slovenia. A stochastic cost frontier model is employed to estimate and decompose the total factor productivity (TFP) growth of water distribution utilities in the 1997-2003 period. The main goal is to...

The sustainable development goal for water and sanitation - to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all is a lofty one. Worldwide, 2.4 billion people remain without access to improved sanitation, and nearly 0.7 billion remain without access to improved...