Benchmarking in Public Waste Management

The German public sector and especially public waste disposal has been criticized the last year for being rather inefficient. As a consequence, the charges for those services, seemingly to high and also differing regionally to a considerable extend, are influenced by those inefficiencies. This project attempts to identify the differences in efficiency among waste disposal firms and their causal factors. In addition those inefficiencies which are caused by the firms themselves are to be distinguished from inefficiencies due to the regulatory or political design. The methodological problem is to apply an evaluation technique able to take into account explicitly the technical heterogeneity of the waste disposal firms and the non-market causes and effects of waste disposal (externalities).