On 26 December 2005, the Director of the Foundation and Professor Gustavo Sánchez García signed a research agreement with the aim of carrying out the aforementioned work. The main objectives of the research are the following:
- To analyse the existence or absence of significant differences between public and private companies in the urban services sector. To this end, the researcher carries out a DEA analysis of efficiency that relates the cost of providing the services with some of their indicators, such as: the number of inhabitants served; the urbanised surface area of the municipality; waste collection figures; among others.
- To study other factors that may affect the behaviour of firms in the sector, as well as their relative weight in the behaviour of firms, once the status of the above-mentioned differences due to the ownership factor has been ascertained.
Many authors have studied the differences between public and private enterprises from different perspectives. The aspect that has attracted most attention in the academic world has been the analysis of the differences in efficiency between the two types of enterprises. In general, it is concluded that the public company is more inefficient than the private company. This conclusion has guided many privatisation processes around the world.
Other research has pointed to the public sector as inefficient in providing services to citizens. It is argued that the generation of competitive processes allows public services to be offered at lower prices. This form of privatisation does not involve the sale of assets, but only the outsourcing of services. These services are produced by private companies, in principle more efficient than public ones, following a competitive award process that ensures greater efficiency by choosing the best among the possible bids.
The literature review aims to find the justification for the inefficiency of SOEs. The references are property rights theory, public choice theory and the literature on the externalisation of public services.
The research also focuses on the impact of the above factors on the cost of service provision and the efficiency of services. To this end, the work is based on two lines of research. The first is a review of the determinants of service provision costs that the literature identifies as relevant. In the second, we review the literature on the effect of ownership or outsourcing of services on the efficiency of service provision.