212 research outputs found
Performance Evaluation of Water Services in Italy: A Meta-Frontier Approach Accounting for Regional Heterogeneities
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Performance Evaluation of Water Services in Italy: A Meta-Frontier Approach Accounting for Regional Heterogeneities
by Corrado lo StortoORCID
Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Naples Federico II, 80125 Naples, Italy
Water 2022, 14(18), 2882; https://doi.org/10.3390/w14182882
Received: 22 August 2022 / Revised: 11 September 2022 / Accepted: 13 September 2022 / Published: 15 September 2022
(This article belongs to the Section Water Resources Management, Policy and Governance)
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Abstract
Data relative to the water services industry in Italy indicate that there is a serious infrastructure gap between the southern regions and isles and the rest of the country. In these geographical areas, water utilities are provided with substantial public grants from the central and local governments to support investments necessary to mitigate the infrastructure divide by increasing capacity and improve service quality. This paper implements a meta-frontier non-parametric approach based on a data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the efficiencies of 71 Italian water utilities, accounting for the differentiated contexts in which they operate. A short-term perspective was assumed to estimate efficiency, considering the production factors associated with the infrastructure assets as non-discretionary inputs in the specification of the meta-frontier model. The results showed that water utilities operating in the southern regions and isles suffer from an efficiency gap in comparison to those in the northern and central regions. The average efficiency gap was 9.7%, achieving 24.9% in the worst case. Moreover, a more in-depth analysis focusing on the water utilities in the southern regions and isles indicated that scale inefficiencies might be an important determinant of such an efficiency gap. Indeed, slightly more than 69% of the water utilities operated at increasing returns to scale. Evidence from this study raises concern about the appropriate structure of the Italian water service industry and, particularly, the optimal size of the utilities and the financial sustainability of water services in the southern regions and isles
Efficiency, Conflicting Goals and Trade-Offs: A Nonparametric Analysis of the Water and Wastewater Service Industry in Italy
No full textThis paper presents a benchmarking study of the water and wastewater industry in Italy. A three-stage modeling approach was implemented to measure the efficiency of 53 utility operators. This approach is based on the implementation of network and conventional data envelopment analysis (DEA) to model the production process of the water service utility operators. In comparison to the conventional black-box or one-stage production model generally adopted in previous studies, the proposed approach provides information relative to the different efficiency components of the stages and blocks of the water service production process and its overall efficiency. Further, by shifting the efficiency analysis to a two-dimensional performance space, i.e., resource and market-efficiency, it offers a more comprehensive view of the water service industry and allows accounting for different business goals at the same time and for an investigation of industry trade-offs. Results show that the operators’ efficiencies in the Italian water service industry are generally variable and low. There are no water service utilities which are 100% efficient from the resource-efficiency perspective, and the maximum efficiency score is 0.545. Efficiency measurements suggest that there is a general orientation of the Italian water industry to not invest in upgrading and improving the infrastructure assets, and achieving an acceptable efficiency in the operations is critical to delivering water services to market in an efficient way. Only one utility operator is 100% efficient from the market-efficiency perspective. The low tariffs adopted by the water service operators do not allow the gaining of satisfactory service remuneration and the achievement of long-term business sustainability. The joint analysis of the resource and market efficiency scores indicates that there is a trade-off between the corresponding business goals
Customer-Supplier Relational Configurations and the inter-firm Coordination Pattern in the Italian Automotive Industry
No full textEcological Efficiency Based Ranking of Cities: A Combined DEA Cross-Efficiency and Shannon’s Entropy Method
No full textIn this paper, a method is proposed to calculate a comprehensive index that calculates the ecological efficiency of a city by combining together the measurements provided by some Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) cross-efficiency models using the Shannon’s entropy index. The DEA models include non-discretionary uncontrollable inputs, desirable and undesirable outputs.
The method is implemented to compute the ecological efficiency of a sample of 116 Italian provincial capital cities in 2011 as a case study. Results emerging from the case study show that the proposed index has a good discrimination power and performs better than the ranking provided by the Sole24Ore, which is generally used in Italy to conduct benchmarking studies. While the sustainability index proposed by the Sole24Ore utilizes a set of subjective weights to aggregate individual indicators, the adoption of the DEA based method limits the subjectivity to the selection of the models. The ecological efficiency measurements generated by the implementation of the method for the Italian cities indicate that they perform very differently, and generally largest cities in terms of population size achieve a higher efficiency score
Are Public-Private Partnerships a Source of Greater Efficiency in Water Supply? Results of a Non-Parametric Performance Analysis Relating to the Italian Industry
No full textThis article reports the outcome of a performance study of the water service provision industry in Italy. The study evaluates the efficiency of 21 “private or public-private” equity and 32 “public” equity water service operators and investigates controlling factors. In particular, the influence that the operator typology and service management nature - private vs. public - has on efficiency is assessed. The study employed a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis methodology. In the first stage, the operational efficiency of water supply operators is calculated by implementing a conventional BCC
DEA model, that uses both physical infrastructure and financial input and output variables to explore economies of scale. In the second stage, bootstrapped DEA and Tobit regression are performed to estimate the influence that a number of environmental factors have on water supplier efficiency. The results show that the integrated water provision industry in Italy is characterized by operational inefficiencies of service operators, and scale and agglomeration economies may have a not negligible effect on efficiency. In addition, the operator typology and its geographical location affect efficiency
Benchmarking Website Performance in the Public Sector: A Non Parametric Approach
No full textIn this paper the outcome of a benchmarking study that compares organization websites in the public sector is presented. In particular, 31 websites of Italian public universities are compared considering the website cognitive efficiency as a measure of its overall performance, i.e. usability and accessibility. Data Envelopment Analysis is performed to generate a measurement for the cognitive efficiency, while cross-efficiency is used to alleviate the weak discriminating capability of the basic DEA model, and have a ranking of sample websites. Seven university websites are 100% cognitive efficient and average efficiency is at 61.63%. Results also show that website cognitive efficiency is positively influenced by the user perceived attractiveness and negatively by the time over-consumption during navigatio
The analysis of the cost-revenue production cycle efficiency of the Italian airports: A NSBM DEA approach
No full textThis paper measures the efficiency of Italian airports using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Particularly, the efficiency of an airport is evaluated at three different stages of its cost-revenue production cycle, i.e. cost-operations-revenue stages, while network-slack based measure DEA (NSBM-DEA) is adopted to generate efficiency measurements for the airports at each stage. Results show that the suggested modeling approach has a better discrimination capability than the traditional black-box DEA model and provides important insights for policy makers and airport concessionaires useful for improving industry performance and airport management
A peeling DEA-game cross efficiency procedure to classify suppliers
No full textThis paper proposes a non-parametric procedure to classify suppliers. The procedure adopts a peeling approach and Data Envelopment Analysis-game cross efficiency (DEA-GXE) method to group a set of suppliers into classes. In DEA-GXE each supplier is seen as a player competing in an uncooperative environment, seeking to maximize efficiency under the condition that the other suppliers’cross-efficiency does not deteriorate. The procedure is useful when there is a long list of suppliers that should be assessed by the customer, providing an agile decision-making tool
Measuring Technical Efficiency of Cars: A Field Investigation in the Italian Domestic Market
No full textThis paper implemented Data Envelopment Analysis to develop a measure of technical efficiency (TE) for a car. The measurement of TE uses published technical data and judgements by industry experts. It is assumed that the technical value of a car is a function of a functional feature performance set of the product delivered to users when bearing some usage and ownership costs. TE is calculated for a sample of 216 cars sold in the Italian market from the 1970s to the early 1990s
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