The efficiency of the municipal waste management model in the Italian Municipalities

In recent years, the role played by Public Administration in producing local public services has changed dramatically.This is due partly to the increasing burden of complex necessities in the sector, as well as to the progressive evolution of society (Andrews and Entwisle, 2014). As a result, the government is now responsible for providing fundamental services in the lives of all individual citizens (Spallini, 2014). Unfortunately, notwithstanding the increase in demand, given the current ongoing recession, the public services sector suffers from a lack of financial resources.In order to resolve this conflict, the PA must adopt the strategy of increasing the efficiency of producing public services, while at the same time reducing and streamlining costs. To do this, the production of public services must be rationalized by adopting more efficient management models (Andrews and Entwisle, 2014).The aim of this paper is to analyse the efficiency of management in the municipal waste service in Italian cities and to find and examine the connection between the levels of efficiency and the management model adopted by each city.This study uses Data Envelopment Analysis to calculate a score for efficiency and to investigate the economies of scale in reference to the management models used.As a primary result, we have identified a positive relationship between dimension and efficiency, given that we discovered more efficient management models with public capital or mixed public-private rather than those operating with only private equity capital.