Abstract
Water shortages, public demonstrations and lack of service delivery have plagued many South African water services authorities (WSAs) for a number of years. From 2004–2007 the National Benchmarking Initiative (NBI) was implemented to improve the performance, efficiency and sustainability of WSAs. The current study demonstrates the use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the Malmquist productivity index (MPI) for the assessment of the effectiveness of the NBI in achieving these goals. Furthermore, the MPI is used to assess the impact that the termination of the NBI had on the efficiency of the WSAs in the years that followed. In conclusion, the MPI is identified as a valuable tool for regulators and policy makers that wish to assess the performance of their benchmarking initiatives.
Highlights
South Africa is a water-scarce country and the effective management of water resources is essential for the continued provision of services to the public (Fisher-Jeffes et al, 2015)
Performance benchmarking was initially used in the private sector and not considered for the public sector because government officials maintained that their organisations were unique and any comparisons would be of no use (Ammons, 1999)
The current study addresses this gap in the literature by providing such an assessment, and using it to evaluate the effectiveness of the National Benchmarking Initiative (NBI) in improving the efficiency of water services authorities (WSAs)
Summary
South Africa is a water-scarce country and the effective management of water resources is essential for the continued provision of services to the public (Fisher-Jeffes et al, 2015). While there are many instances of benchmarking practices in the private sector, the most prominent is the successful use of benchmarking by the Xerox Corporation in the early 1980s which showed that organisations need not be alike for them to be able to learn from each other (Ammons et al, 2001). In this case, the Xerox Corporation learnt valuable warehousing and distribution lessons from a benchmarking project undertaken with the catalogue merchant L. These examples include, but are not limited to, local authorities where performance was assessed by the ability of the authorities to provide ‘best value’ services, i.e., to raise standards while limiting costs (Bowerman and Ball, 2000), and police forces, where reduction in crime and increase in public confidence were top performance objectives (Collier, 2006)
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