The paper compares groups from 600 municipalities, according to different categories of management models: (1) water supply and sanitation (WSS) managed by a municipal autarchy, through cooperation with FUNASA; (2) WSS managed by a municipal autarchy that had had a cooperation agreement with FUNASA; (3) WSS managed by a municipal autarchy; (4) water supply managed by COPASA and sanitation directly by the municipality; (5) both water supply and sanitation managed by COPASA; (6) WSS directly managed by the municipality; (7) new municipalities, created after 1989. The research used data of 1998 from secondary sources. Operational, epidemiological, and social indicators were created for each municipality. The comparisons were performed by several statistical techniques, including multivariate ones. The results indicate differences between the management models and, besides the good performance of COPASA regarding some specific aspects, highlight the positive performance of the models based on the autarchy organization.
Management; water supply; sanitation; indicator; public policy
