Does Contracting for the Provision of Public Services Decrease Prices? Evidence from French Water Public Services

Simon Porcher

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This article looks at the reasons for and results of contracting out in local public services, with specific regards to its possible effects on price and other performance determinants. It uses a rich city-level dataset of water public services in France between 1998 and 2008. We find evidence, using alternative econometric methods, that contracting out to private operators is associated with higher prices on average ceteris paribus. This pattern is consistent with the study of units switching from an organizational form to another. We finally discuss several reasons for the existing price gap between direct management (public management) and contracting out (private management) using the expense-preferences of managers.

Keywords: public-private partnerships; water; efficiency; Propensity score matching; differences-in-differences; performance; ownership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-06-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cta, nep-eff and nep-ure
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-02145863v2
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-02145863v2/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-02145863

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().