Direct Management or Inter-Municipal Cooperation in Smaller Municipalities? Exploring Cost Efficiency and Installed Capa
- PDF / 528,116 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 69 Downloads / 150 Views
Direct Management or Inter-Municipal Cooperation in Smaller Municipalities? Exploring Cost Efficiency and Installed Capacity in Drinking Water Supply José Luis Zafra-Gómez 1 & Victor Giménez-García 2 & Cristina María Campos-Alba 3 & Emilio José de la Higuera-Molina 3 Received: 12 June 2019 / Accepted: 16 September 2020/ Published online: 2 October 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
The aim of this study is to determine whether, in small municipalities, drinking water services are supplied more efficiently under direct public provision or through intermunicipal cooperation. This analysis focuses on the use made of installed capacity, examining whether similar-sized municipalities have optimised their fixed infrastructure and/or physical inputs. A sample of 750 Spanish municipalities, each with fewer than 5000 inhabitants, was analysed, with data for the period 2014–2016, using a new order-m directional method with data panel and calculating the technological gap ratio, to evaluate the impact of different management forms on the efficiency obtained, thus measuring the use made of installed capacity. The main results obtained show that municipal direct management is more cost efficient but that inter-municipal cooperation makes better use of installed capacity. However, in similar-sized municipalities there are no significant differences in the latter respect according to the management form adopted, and therefore the differences observed in cost efficiency between the two management forms are associated with variable costs. Keywords Cost efficiency, direct provision . Inter-municipal cooperation . Drinking water supply
* José Luis Zafra-Gómez [email protected] Victor Giménez-García [email protected] Cristina María Campos-Alba [email protected] Emilio José de la Higuera-Molina [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
4290
Zafra-Gómez J.L. et al.
1 Introduction A major research question in the field of municipal government is that of which forms of management provide the most efficient delivery of public services. In this respect, studies have traditionally focused on whether private delivery is more efficient than direct public management. However, not all local entities are able to privatise their public services, seeking thereby to improve efficiency; for example, smaller municipalities that wish to do so often have difficulty in finding available suppliers (Johnston and Girth 2012; Molinos-Senante and Maziotis 2019a, 2019b, 2020), as the limited scale of their services is sub-optimal and makes them less attractive to private providers (Bel and Fageda 2006; Campos-Alba et al. 2020a). Accordingly, most such local governments have tended to manage their public services directly. With respect to the drinking water supply service, however, the use of this management form, either directly or through public companies, has been criticised as being incapable of improving the quality of service or of expanding its coverage (Lo Storto 2014), due to the high maintenanc
Data Loading...
