Determining the contribution of technical change, efficiency change and scale change to productivity growth in the privatized English and Welsh water and sewerage industry: 1985–2000

Saal, David S.; Parker, David; Weyman‐Jones, Thomas

doi:10.1007/s11123-007-0040-z

Cited by 233 publications

(168 citation statements)

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“…The fact that these indexes are the same may be explained by the fact that the length of period is short which produces only a small variation when calculating the 13 As a sample of water studies utilizing labor and energy as input factors see Tupper and Rezende (2004) for the Brazilian case; Garcia and Thomas (2001) for the French case; Fabbri and Fraquelli (2000) for the Italian case; Saal and Parker (2004) and Saal et al (2007) for the English and Welsh case. weights for the different indexes.…”

Section: Total Factor Productivity Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Benchmarking Central American water utilities

Corton

Berg

2009

Utilities Policy

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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 quality, and cost containment. The aim is to provide policy-makers and investment funds institutions with quantitative evidence on the effectiveness of the regional water sectors and utilities under different perspectives. In addition to key sector performance indicators, the analysis considers several benchmarking methodologies to assess technical and cost efficiency.

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Section: Total Factor Productivity Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Benchmarking Central American water utilities

Corton

Berg

2009

Utilities Policy

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“…This result supports the hypothesis that the production process of German public theaters is characterized by very limited opportunities to benefit from technological improvements and suggests that the cost-disease effect is at play in this sector. Nevertheless, as noted by Saal et al (2007), this technological change estimate is for a non-existent hypothetical sample median firm with unchanging characteristics. Hence, it does not account for changes in inputs and outputs and should be interpreted with caution.…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

Baumol’s cost disease, efficiency, and productivity in the performing arts: an analysis of german public theaters

Last

Wetzel

2011

J Cult Econ

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in May 2010This paper analyzes the productivity development in the German public theater sector for the seasons 1991/1992-2005/2006. Using a stochastic distance frontier approach that allows to decompose total factor productivity change into different sources we examine (a) whether Baumol's cost-disease hypothesis is valid in this sector and (b) if so, whether its negative influence on productivity can be compensated by efficiency gains. The findings indicate an increase in real unit labor cost as a result of rising wage rates and, thus, support the cost-disease hypothesis. Furthermore, increasing returns to scale are observed for the majority of the theaters which implies that significant efficiency gains can be realized by the exploitation of scale economies. However, because of the increasing unit labor cost and an increasing scale inefficiency we find an overall decrease in average productivity of about 8 percent within the sample period.

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“…Some have evaluated the impact of privatization on the efficiency and productivity of water companies (Ashton, 2000;Parker, 2000, 2001;Marques, 2008). Other have focused on evaluating the impact of regulation on productivity growth (Saal and Reid, 2004;Erbetta and Cave, 2007;Saal et al, 2007;Bottaso and Conti, 2009;Maziotis et al, 2009;Portela et al, 2011;Maziotis et al, 2012Molinos-Senante et al, 2014Maziotis et al, 2015) Despite of the wide number of studies aimed toward assessing the productivity change of the regulated water industry in England and Wales, to the best of our knowledge, none of them extended their methodologies to setting the X factor for the English and Welsh water and sewerage regulated companies. Researchers have developed DEA (Coelli and Walding, 2006) or index-number approach Bernstein et al, 2006) to measure productivity growth and propose X factors in regulated industries that include the water supply industry in Australia, the electricity network in New Zealand, and the telecommunication industry in Peru.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Price-cap regulation in the English and Welsh water industry: A proposal for measuring productivity performance

et al. 2016

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Abstract:Privately owned water utilities typically operate under a regulated monopoly regime. Price-cap regulation has been introduced as a means to enhance efficiency and innovation. The main objective of this paper is to propose a methodology for measuring productivity change across companies and over time when the sample size is limited. An empirical application is developed for the UK water and sewerage companies (WaSCs) for the period 1991-2008. A panel index approach is applied to decompose and derive unit-specific productivity growth as a function of the productivity growth achieved by benchmark firms, and the catch-up to the benchmark firm achieved by less productive firms. The results indicated that significant gains in productivity occurred after 2000, when the regulator set tighter reviews. However, the average WaSC still must improve towards the benchmarking firm by 2.69% over a period of five years to achieve comparable performance. This study is relevant to regulators who are interested in developing comparative performance measurement when the number of water companies that can be evaluated is limited. Moreover, setting an appropriate X factor is essential to improve the efficiency of water companies and this study helps to achieve this challenge.

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Determining the contribution of technical change, efficiency change and scale change to productivity growth in the privatized English and Welsh water and sewerage industry: 1985–2000

Abstract: Water, Productivity, Efficiency, Privatization, Price cap regulation, Environmental qualify, D24, L95, L33, L51,

Cited by 233 publications

References 12 publications

Benchmarking Central American water utilities

Benchmarking Central American water utilities

Baumol’s cost disease, efficiency, and productivity in the performing arts: an analysis of german public theaters

Price-cap regulation in the English and Welsh water industry: A proposal for measuring productivity performance

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