In hot water? : issues at stake in the regulation of French water public services

Abstract

In France, private firms manage the majority of water services but there is still a large part of water services under direct management. Such a diversity of governance forms allows for efficiency and quality benchmarking between direct and delegated management, and raises questions about the determinants of the choice of the local government to manage or delegate, and to switch from a governance model to the other. This paper reviews the literature on these issues in France. Moreover, the paper identifies several hot issues deserving further research such as scale and scope economics, and the implementation of social tariffs or increasing block tariffs.