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...

Regulators can utilize a number of alternative methodologies for comparing firm efficiency, but these approaches need to be robust to be accepted by stakeholders. This study evaluates the consistency of water utility performance rankings for Peruvian water utilities. The results indicate that...

Yardstick regulation requires the utilization of benchmarking, a valuable tool for improving the public service delivery, especially in developing countries where inefficiencies translate into negative health impacts and social unrest. However, research must account for both cost and quality of...

This paper examines the robustness of efficiency score rankings across four distributional assumptions for trans-log stochastic production-frontier models, using data from 1,221 Japanese water utilities (for 2004 and 2005). One-sided error terms considered include the half-normal, truncated...

This paper performs a literature update of quantitative studies of water and sanitation services (WSS). There are 190 studies which use cost or production functions to evaluate the performance of WSS utilities. The studies examine (1) the scale, scope or density economies of utilities in a...