Urban solid waste services usually act as natural monopolies and so, among others reasons, they are characterized by reduced incentives towards efficiency and innovation. The evaluation of performance and, in particular, the application of benchmarking can assume an excellent role to challenge this situation. In Portugal, the market of urban solid waste is characterized by 29 "wholesale" firms (transportation, treatment and separate collection) and hundreds of "retail" utilities (collection). The collection activity is still largely provided directly by the municipalities. The current study intends to evaluate the efficiency of the Portuguese "wholesale" market of solid waste services, encompassing the whole Continental Portuguese population, using the new robust technique of non-parametric benchmarking technique of data envelopment analysis (DEA), based on the concept of order-m. The outcomes depicted significant inefficiency. In the case of efficiently, firms that would have a reduction of costs of more than 100 million euros in 2005 operated.
urban solid waste services; Portugal; efficiency; regulation; data envelopment analysis
