Costi di produzione ed erogazione di acqua potabile. Una proposta di analisi dell'efficienza

- Water will be a basic problem in the future of the world. At the moment in Italy the main problem lies in water reserve reductions facing a growing demand, while for drinkable water more and more administrator authorities are facing a budget deficit. The causes of this national and local situation are the administrative monopoly and the absence of planning and coordination policies, that would rationalize water use without rationing it, starting from an awareness of the costs of different involved variables. The economic quality of spring and consumption water, the oldness of the waterworks and pipe networks, the extreme fragmentation of waterworks (often of minimal dimension), their territorial localisation, the absence of a common method of charges, the scanty use of analysis of management, are some of the causes of a unique and surprising variability of costs, proceeds and tariffs. This paper analyzes the generation and the structure of the costs of drinkable water in an area representative of many national characteristics on the environmental, physic and socio-economic level. The quest for more efficient forms of management and for a more transparent determination of the tariffs has been carried on through the use of custom indexes of productivity and of production. These indexes summarise the existence of scale economies, of pipe network related diseconomies, and of economies of localisation and density of the consumers. The paper presents a synthesis of the observations gathered from about two hundred waterworks subdivided by owner and entrepreneurial typologies