Sector Organization, Governance, and the Inefficiency of African Water Utilities

By Antonio Estache, E. Kouassi. 2002

223 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The authors analyze the determinants of the efficiency levels reached by twenty one African water utilities. They assess efficiency through the estimation of a production frontier for the sector in Africa. The efficiency estimates confirm much of the common perceptions from partial productivity indicators. They point to a great heterogeneity in the African water utilities' performances, the predominance of constant returns to scale, and the great rate of technological progress. And the authors show that the institutional capacity of the country, as well as its governance quality, are significant driving factors in the performance of each firm.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/429c1820571d1b9700e04d328995a628549568e4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Management Science and Operations Research

In Pollution

Antonio Estache

Citations in the corpus

Has Private Participation in Water and Sewerage Improved Coverage? Empirical Evidence from Latin America (2004, background): “10 It is important to note that very few of the operators in Estache and Kouassi (2002) had any form of private sector participation over this period – apparently only two (see Table 1 in their paper).”
Looking ahead: long-term prospects for Africa's agricultural development and food security (2005, result): “This tendency was substantiated by a study conducted by Estache and Kouassi (2002) that showed that high levels of inefficiency, including inaccessibility and unavailability of resources, are linked with weak governance and institutions.”
Quo vadis efficiency analysis of water distribution? A comparative literature review (2009, background): “result coincides with Estache and Kouassi (2002) , who estimate a Cobb-Douglas”
Infrastructure: A survey of recent and upcoming issues (2006, background): “…significance of country wide corruption measures on infrastructure performance indicators (Rossi and del Bo (2004) on Latin American electricity companies; Estache and Kouassi (2002) on African water companies, Estache, Goicoechea and Trujillo (2006) for all utilities across developing countries).”
An Empirical Analysis of State and Private Sector Provision of Water Services in Africa (2006, background): “A study by Estache and Kouassi (2002), using a sample of 21 African water utilities during 1995–97, estimated a production function from an unbalanced panel data set and used Tobit modeling to relate resulting inefficiency scores to governance and ownership variables.”