Alternative Service Delivery in Canadian Local Governments: The Costs of Producing Solid Waste Management Services‪.‬

In this paper, key findings are presented from three complementary national surveys of producers in the Canadian solid waste management industry. The surveys, conducted by the Local Government Institute between 1995 and 1999 focused on factors that predict the: unit costs (costs per unit of output) of residential solid waste collection, residential recycling and landfills, respectively. Among the variables that were examined was the production arrangement for each service. A key question, based on the existing literature is whether private producers tend to be more efficient than their public counterparts. The hypothesis that private producers will tend to be more efficient is well entrenched in the literature, which has developed from Ostrom et al's initial formulation (1961) of a polycentric theory of the governance of metropolitan areas. Although most research suggests that private producers are more efficient, existing Canadian research has tended to focus on relatively few services. The only national study of public and private producers of local services was conducted in the early 1980s and focused on residential solid waste collection (McDavid 1985).