Economies of Scale and Technical Efficiency in Community Water Systems

Jhih-Shyang Shih, Winston Harrington, William Pizer and Kenneth Gillingham

No 10788, Discussion Papers from Resources for the Future

Abstract: In this study we use datasets from the 1995 and 2000 Community Water Supply surveys to examine the production costs of water supply systems. We first estimate the economies of scale in water supply by estimating the total unit cost as well as individual component cost elasticities. For total unit cost elasticity, we find that a 1% increase in production reduces unit costs by a statistically significant 0.16%. For individual component cost elasticities, we find that higher economies of scale exist in capital costs, outside costs, other costs, and materials costs; labor costs and energy costs exhibit lower but still positive economies of scale. These economies of scale may reflect production economies or suggest that larger systems are better than smaller systems at bargaining and can obtain inputs at a lower unit cost. Importantly, bargaining gains and some production economies do not necessarily depend on water systems' becoming physically interconnected.

Keywords: Resource/Energy; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/10788/files/dp040015.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Economies of Scale and Technical Efficiency in Community Water Systems (2004)
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:ags:rffdps:10788

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.10788

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Resources for the Future Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().