Essays in the measurement of efficiency for the English and Welsh water and sewerage industry

Pointon, Charlotte 2014. Essays in the measurement of efficiency for the English and Welsh water and sewerage industry. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

The English and Welsh water and sewerage industry was privatised in 1989 and is characterised by a series of regional monopolies. The majority of consumers currently have no choice in their supplier. The industry is regulated by Ofwat to guarantee the best value for customers whilst enabling the companies to undertake their activities. The motivation of this thesis is to examine the effectiveness of regulation. The aim is to examine five research questions. Firstly, has regulation encouraged convergence amongst the efficiency scores? Secondly, have the 1999 and 2004 price reviews been effective in improving efficiency? Thirdly, is there a capex bias in the industry? The final two aims come from a methodological perspective: firstly, to allow for the incorporation of environmental variables within the measurement of efficiency and secondly, to incorporate the long asset life of capital by incorporating capital as an intertemporal factor of production. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is employed to measure efficiency which is a non-parametric technique that creates a linear frontier over the data. Convergence is examined by drawing from the growth literature to examine

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Business (Including Economics)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor
Funders:	ESRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	19 Mar 2016 23:54
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/72007

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