The optimal size of territorial units in the outsourcing of waste service: An empirical approach.

This study provides new insights into the relation between the size of the territorial units for which the provision of waste services is entrusted to external operators and their efficiency. The need for a deeper investigation of this relation arises from the fact that on the one hand, the European Union is pushing its Member States towards the adoption of laws aimed at ensuring competition for the market whenever competition in the market is possible; on the other, both the theoretical and the empirical literature cautions policymakers against the risks associated with contracting out. This problem is addressed here through an efficiency analysis of Italian municipalities in the organization of waste services.

A methodological proposal to determine the optimal levels of inter-municipal cooperation in the organization of solid waste management systems.

The paper proposes a procedure based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) in order to identify the optimal dimension for inter-municipal cooperation in waste management. Given: (a) a set of decision making units (DMUs) and a production process that virtually transforms municipal expenditure in different amounts of sorted and unsorted waste, (b) a set of exogenous variables conditioning the operational environment of the DMUs and (c) a variable used for measuring the dimension of inter-municipal cooperation, the procedure realizes an iterative correction of input values and efficiency scores to purge, first, the effects of the exogenous variables, and then those of the dimensional variable. In this way, an indicator of the impact of the dimensional variable on the efficiency is obtained for each of the observed DMUs.