Economías de escala en agua y saneamiento: examen de la literatura

Gustavo Ferro, Emilio J. Lentini and Augusto Mercadier
Additional contact information
Emilio J. Lentini: CETA - Centro de Estudios Transdisciplinarios del Agua [Buenos Aires] - Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias [Buenos Aires] - UBA - Universidad de Buenos Aires [Buenos Aires]

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This study is aimed to survey the international literature on economies of scale in the water and sanitation sector, to synthesize it, and to extract a common thread. In the whole world they are been discussing how to provide a more equitable access and a more efficient provision. One issue related with efficiency is the possibility of taking advantage from economies of scale. The sector industrial structures had been changing in many places, through consolidation of highly atomized services, or the split of concentrated providers, or by changes in the pattern of providers' property, and those changes had been matter of heavy discussions. Some decisions could be very complex, because of political and social interests. The theoretical discussion and empirical results on scale economics in water and sanitation are useful to discover the trade-offs between concentration and de-concentration of services as policy measures.The studies from an important set of countries show scale economies (in different countries with different situations) in population served between 100 thousand to 1 million (in some cases extending to many millions), or with population densities of until 250 inhabitants per square kilometers, or with volumes up to 70 million of cubic meters per year. With lower populations, volumes or densities, first we can expect constant returns to scale, and next, in the larger enterprises, diseconomies of scale; in smaller providers, there are gains of agglomerating services.

Keywords: scale economies; sanitation; water; economías de escala; agua; saneamiento (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-01-29
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00460661v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-00460661v1/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-00460661

Access Statistics for this paper

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