Economic and Financial Regulation and Opex Efficiency of Brazilian Water Supply and Sewage Services
water and sewage services; efficiency; regulation.
Water supply and sewage services are essential for the quality of life of the population and must be provided efficiently. The efficiency in the provision of these services is crucial to ensure greater productivity in service delivery, and regulation can contribute to improving efficiency. Thus, this study aims to investigate the influence of economic-financial regulations on the efficiency of water supply and sewage service concessionaires between the years 2017 and 2022. The sample consists of 130 basic sanitation providers and 30 regulatory agencies, with indicators in economic-financial regulations being analyzed to test their relationship with the efficiency of the providers. To this end, the analysis is divided into two stages. In the first stage, an efficiency analysis of the providers will be conducted using the Dynamic DEA Model. In the second stage, the efficiency scores obtained will be considered as dependent variables, and the relationship between economic-financial regulations and the efficiency of the concessionaires will be verified, along with other explanatory variables (water network density; sewage network density; combined water and sewage network density; proportion of residential clients relative to total clients; GDP per capita; and dummy for the economic standards analyzed).