Abstract
Market Environment around water work industry is rapidly changing. ISO, International Organization for Standardization, announced the international water work service standard for comparison and evaluation between nations and businesses. And developed countries in water work are introducing market principle for growth of nation's water industry and reinforcement of its competitiveness. Also, some local governments entrusted their water utilities for improvement of competitiveness of water work. However, as some failure cases from overseas came out with emphasis, there are many refuting perspective about entrusted operation achievements of domestic water market. Hence, this paper evaluated competitiveness of domestic local water utilities from the perspective of productivity. After evaluating productivity using Malmquist productivity index, the authors compared and analyzed whether there is a difference of productivity between two different operating types by using Mann-Whitney test. As a result of analysis, it has shown that local water utilities achieved higher productivity at entrusted operation type rather than direct operation type. The local water utilities which chose entrusted operation had increased the productivity 13.9% on total factor productivity(TFP) during experimenting period, while the local water utilities which chose direct operation had increased 0.2%. The background of achieving this high productivity in entrusted operation was analyzed as a result of the higher technological effectiveness of a special water company. The result of this study can be referred when local government needs to decide on what operating types they will use.