Evaluating the Efficiency of Municipal Solid Waste Collection Services in Developing Countries: The Case of Chile

Abstract

Due to the increasing volume of waste and the increasingly complex administration of its collection and disposal, solid waste management is quickly becoming a demanding issue for municipalities all over the world. Benchmarking the effectiveness of municipal solid waste management is critical for assessing municipalities’ resource management performance and developing public policies for improvement. The main contribution of this article is an analysis of the efficiency of municipal collection services in Chile focusing in house solid waste. This study estimates the economic and technical efficiency using Stochastic Frontier Models for socio-economic, technical and human geography data from 2014 to 2019 for a sample of 280 municipalities, as well as an analysis of the internal and external factors that influence the efficiency levels shown by municipalities using an econometric model with 2017 socio-economic data. In addition, the spatial distribution of efficiency is investigated, with the Moran index used to identify clusters of towns to see if there is any spatial autocorrelation. The findings show that there are considerable disparities depending on whether the collection is private, public or mixed, and that rural municipalities are inefficient. The efficiency is not distributed evenly throughout space. The findings and recommendations of this study are intended to aid in the improvement of municipal and public policies relating to MSW management efficiency.