| Popis: |
Tightening of regulation on the quality of water and wastewater services often leads to the growth of capital expenditure in industry and higher bills for water customers. Applying an outcome-orientated approach to the economic regulation of the sector in England and Wales, shifts the focus away from how many assets a business has, towards whether a company is capable of delivering through its asset base, what ultimately matters to their customers. Although this approach sounds agreeable and almost common sense, its translation into metrics is a challenge with industry requiring a better understanding of the behavioural implications of a regulatory system built around outcomes. This paper contributes to the current debate on how to best address industry’s concerns, whilst meeting the regulator’s expectations. A way to reconcile performance measurement with a genuine outcome orientation by means of Input-Output Analysis (IOA) is outlined. IOA is identified as a suitable tool to manipulate the empirical data commonly available in industry for the purpose of tackling technical planning, environmental evaluation and costing problems for a multistage, multi-input, multi-output (and possibly multi-location) supply network. A simplified wastewater system underpinned by real-life industry data is used throughout the paper for illustrative purposes |
