The efficiency of municipal solid waste collection in Mexico

Since the 1980's, some Mexican municipalities have subcontracted waste collection services to private companies, with an eye on increasing the efficiency of this service. However, the impact of private management on the Mexican waste sector performance has not been evaluated. In this study, the efficiency of waste collection in Mexico was analyzed to test the hypothesis that private companies are more efficient at waste collection than municipal governments. A two stage double bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was applied to a sample of 1,626 municipalities. In the first stage, unbiased efficiency scores were calculated, and in the second stage, these scores were regressed against a set of environmental covariates which were thought to affect efficiency, including a dummy variable to identify the municipalities where waste is collected by a private company. Results suggest that private waste collection companies are more efficient than municipal governments. Other environmental variables such as population density, average household income, and tourism were also found to affect waste collection efficiency. The analysis also indicates that curbside collection is associated with a higher efficiency, while separate collection of waste is negatively correlated to efficiency.