An Empirical Analysis of State and Private Sector Provision of Water Services in Africa

By C. Kirkpatrick, David W. Parker, Yin-Fang Zhang. 2006

219 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Under pressure from donor agencies and international financial institutions such as the World Bank, some developing countries have experimented with the privatization of water services. This article reviews the econometric evidence on the effects of water privatization in developing economies and presents new results using statistical data envelopment analysis and stochastic cost frontier techniques and data from Africa. The analysis fails to show evidence of better performance by private utilities than by state owned utilities. Among the reasons why water privatization could prove problematic in lower-income economies are the technology of water provision and the nature of the product, transaction costs, and regulatory weaknesses.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Ocean Engineering, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a52703775b093d292e5631fea4d853329111bb3

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 Ocean Engineering

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Infrastructure Public–Private Partnerships in the Developing World: Lessons from Recent Experience (2015, background): “Marin (2009) found that in developing countries, PPPs in the water sector expanded coverage by 24 million people, although network expansion was less than the original commitment.”
Quo vadis efficiency analysis of water distribution? A comparative literature review (2009, methodology): “Using the SFA approach, Kirkpatrick et al. (2006) obtain no statistically significant results for the impact of ownership.”
Does service quality matter in measuring the performance of water utilities (2008, methodology): “…list, some of the most recent papers are Ashton (2000), Jones and Mygind (2000), Estache and Rossi (2002), Anwandter and Ozuna (2002), Corton (2003), Woodbury and Dollery (2004), Cubbin (2005), Kirkpatrick et al. (2006), García-Valiñas and Muñiz (2007), Picazo-Tadeo et al. (2007a, 2007b).”