Thirty years after the privatisation of water. What have we learned?

在西方国家启动雄心勃勃的私有化计划30年后，其成功的结果仍然存在争议。在这项研究中，我们将重点放在英国和西班牙水务公司的私有化上，并对私有化计划的经济后果进行实证评估。在英国，水务公司在20世纪80年代末被私有化，并逐步在国家层面建立了价格上限的监管框架。在西班牙，市政当局仍在将其供水服务私有化的过程中，而且没有一个全国性的监管机构。首先，我们从时间序列的角度研究了两国水务私有化的成功。私有化是否提高了水务公司的效率和生产力？文献主要集中在横断面研究上，结果模糊，这项研究将有助于使用面板数据计量经济学分析围绕私有化成功的辩论。其次，我们研究了不同监管制度的影响，以评估其在提高效率方面的影响：英国和西班牙之间以及西班牙各城市之间。第三，我们分析私有化过程是否产生了垄断利润并促进了私有化公司的寻租行为。最后一个问题在文献中还没有被系统地分析过，它是一个至关重要的问题，因为垄断力量被视为推动过去几十年收入不平等加剧的主要力量之一。

Thirty years after western countries started a very ambitious privatisation program, the outcomes of its success remain controversial. In this research, we focus on the privatisation of water companies in the UK and Spain and empirically assess the economic consequences of the privatisation programs. In the UK, water companies were privatised in the late 1980s, and a regulatory framework with price caps has been established gradually at the national level. In Spain, municipalities are still in the process of privatising their water services and there is not a national regulator. First, we study the success of water privatisation in both countries in a time series perspective. Has privatization increased efficiency and productivity of the water firms? The literature has mainly focused on cross-sectional studies, with ambiguous results, and this research will contribute to the debate around the success of privatisation using panel data econometric analyses. Secondly, we study the effect of different regulatory regimes to assess its effects in promoting efficiency: both between the UK and Spain and across Spanish municipalities. Thirdly, we analyse if the privatisation process has generated monopoly profits and promoted rent-seeking behaviour on the privatised firms. This last question has not been systematically analysed in the literature and arises as one of crucial importance since monopoly power is seen as one of the main forces driving the increase in income inequality of the last decades.