Private production (versus?) cooperation and costs of solid waste services

This paper studies the cost comparison of private production and intermunicipal cooperation in the provision of solid waste services. We conduct our empirical analysis with a sample of small municipalities where both cooperation and/or private production are very frequent. We do not find differences in costs between public and private production in municipalities that not cooperate. On the contrary, our results show that costs are lower in the case of municipalities that cooperate (regardless they use public or private production). In all, our empirical analysis suggests that for small municipalities cooperation is more effective than private production in saving costs.