Marta Garrido-Montañés

The provision of public services, mostly by local governments, has been widely analyzed in the scientific literature. The relevance of these services has generated an incipient demand for information on the part of citizens, which makes it necessary for the bodies responsible for their provision to present adequate levels of transparency. In this context, digitalization is a crucial tool for providing information to citizens and, therefore, contributing to improving the levels of transparency of those organizations that provide public services. Among these, the drinking water supply service stands out, which is crucial for well-being and sustainable progress, and whose analysis is of vital importance, especially in countries such as Spain affected by factors such as climate change and urbanization. In this way, the aim of this paper is to analyze the degree of transparency of the companies providing water supply services in Spain, as well as their degree of digitalization. To this end, a relationship will be established between the Transparency Index of Public Enterprises (INDEP) and the Strategic Project for Economic Recovery and Transformation (PERTE), which measure the degree of transparency and digitalization, respectively. This relationship will be established for a sample of 59 companies responsible for water supply. The main results derived from this study show a wide margin for improvement on the part of the companies analyzed, both in terms of transparency and digitalization, as the vast majority of these companies show a medium–low degree of compliance in both aspects.

The provision of local public services has become one of the main concerns of local governments. Therefore, the selection of the most appropriate form of management to maximize efficiency levels in the provision of local public services has been widely analyzed throughout the academic literature. In this context, the aim of this paper is to add new knowledge to the literature on efficiency in the provision of local public services. To this end, we propose the study of four forms of management (interested indirect management; indirect management by concession; intermunicipal co-operation; public service provision) through a free disposal hull data panel (FDHDP) methodology for the 2014–2016 period. We find that public-private partnership contracting is less efficient on waste removal services when accounting for quality. However, the promised benefits of contracting out are realized when contractors are made responsive to service quality through concessions.

Transparency is considered a key element for developing a reliable government; it is the ability that all public entities have to provide access to all their information. The main objective of this work is to test the differences in the transparency of municipalities between the main indices and a new index made following the regulatory advances in this area at the national level. Called BTI, this new index aims to measure in the best possible way the degree of compliance of Spanish municipalities, through two dimensions (depth and breadth), which measure the quality and the quantity of the information. This work makes a comparison of the BTI with three of the main existing transparency indexes in Spain, to a sample of Spanish provincial capitals. The results obtained reveal clear differences between the indices, where three of the four indices analyzed show that most municipalities only fulfil the Transparency Act at the minimum level, with only a few municipalities reaching the maximum rating range. This work concludes that the BTI index is more demanding than the rest of the indexes. However, ITA stands out with a higher average score than the rest, which indicates that transparency portals are designed to obtain a good score in this index, being less objective. Finally, this paper remembers the importance of having an objective tool to measure transparency, as it can show notable differences with respect to reality.