中欧社会论坛 - China Europa ForumPrivate Management and Public Finance in the Water Industry: a Marriage of Convenience?
Authors: Antonio Massarutto, Vania Paccagnan, Elisabetta Linares
In many countries reforms of water and sanitation utilities have favoured private sector involvement. The drivers of this trend are the need to improve efficiency and professional capabilities of service operation and willingness to relieve public budgets from the heavy burden of investment. Little attention has been devoted, in turn, to the heavy impact this strategy can have on water bills because of the higher cost of capital, what is implicit given the economic risk that the private sector is required to accept. We argue here that these consequences can be very important and outweigh the potential benefits of liberalization. As a capital intensive industry with long economic life of assets, the water industry is particularly vulnerable to the cost of capital, and this creates the case for publicly-supported financial schemes in order to keep this cost as low as possible and guarantee long-run viability as well as affordability. More general implications and policy recommendations concerning the finance of water infrastructure are finally derived.
1. Introduction
Urban water services (UWS) have undergone a radical transformation in the last 20 years in most developed countries (de La Motte et al., 2005; Finger and Allouche, 2006; Massarutto, 2006). Just to recall the most important axes: from local management to regional integration; from public subsidies and public finance to full cost recovery and market finance; from direct management of local authorities to various forms of independent and professional water industry, often (although not solely nor necessarily) with the involvement of the private sector2; from the dominance of water supply and urban network to the one of water resources management at the river basin scale and the growing emphasis on cleanup, treatment and conservation of resources; from simple, discretional and benevolent regulation to more sophisticated, controversial and adversarial regulatory systems; from sectoral water policy focused on infrastructure development to integrated management focused on sustainability.