Measuring Productivity and Efficiency of Portuguese Solid Waste Utilities

摘要

Urban solid waste services usually act as natural monopolies and, as consequence, efficiency and technical progress are to accomplish. The evaluation of performance and, in particular, the application of benchmarking can assume an important role to challenge this situation. The current study intends to evaluate the efficiency and productivity of the Portuguese "wholesale" market of solid waste services, encompassing the whole Continental Portuguese population, using the non-parametric benchmarking techniques of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and of total factor productivity (TFP), respectively. The results depicted significant levels of inefficiency for the year of 2007 and losses of productivity during the period between 2002 and 2007.