O impacto da regulação sobre a eficiência dos prestadores de serviços de água e esgoto no Brasil
In Brazil, some of the critical problems of the sanitation sector are the relevant deficit of water and sewage services, the difficulty of water and sewerage companies (WaSCs) to carry out investments and the existence of operating and maintenance inefficiencies. As an alternative to overcome these issues, the new regulatory framework, enacted in 2007, strengthened regulation and established among its regulatory objectives the universal access and water and sewerage systems efficiency. In this sense, this thesis aims to analyze the impact of regulation on the WaSCs efficiency in Brazil. To this end, we configured a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model unprecedented for the sector, which allows the evaluation of the overall dynamic efficiency and it also allows the evaluation of internal structures efficiency of WaSCs, through a network consisting of 3 interconnected divisions to reflect the regulatory objectives: 1) Expansion/Improvement of Water System; 2) Expansion/Improvement of Sewerage System; and 3) Operation/Maintenance of Water and Sewerage Systems. We ran a Dynamic and Network DEA model for 156 WaSCs in the period 2006-2015 and the results indicated low levels of overall efficiency. The Expansion/Improvement of Water System division achieved the best average efficiency scores, followed by the Operation/Maintenance of Water and Sewerage Systems division and the Expansion/Improvement of Sewerage System division. Regulated WaSCs presented better efficiency measures in the case of Expansion/Improvement of Water System and Operation/Maintenance of Water and Sewerage Systems divisions. In the second stage of the research, a content analysis of the standards issued by 52 regulators identified the presence of regulatory incentives in six proposed thematic categories: 1) Tariff regime; 2) Updating tariffs levels; 3) Systems expansion and improvement; 4) General standards and quality of services provision; 5) Management; and 6) Transparency and accountability. The content analysis of these incentives categories revealed changes in regulators strategies over time and indicated weaknesses, such as a low use of regulatory goals and tariff mechanisms that induce efficiency and productivity gains. The identification of regulatory incentives also allowed the construction of a set of variables capable to represent the regulation, that we applied on panel data models to assess the impact of regulation on WaSCs efficiency. The results obtained in the last stage of analysis allowed confirmation of the central hypothesis of this thesis, that active regulators, regarding the definition of incentive mechanisms, positively impact the WaSCs efficiency in Brazil. The new variables, along with a specific analysis for each Dynamic and Network DEA model division, broaden a discussion about the impact of regulation from a perspective of applying different regulatory strategies, demonstrating that choice of regulatory incentives, the intensity of these incentives and even the number of active regulators are decisive for the WaSCs efficiency.
Água e esgoto no Brasil, Regulação, Incentivos, Eficiência, DEA Dinâmico e de redes
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