Solid‐waste contracting‐out, competition, and bidding practices among Canadian local governments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Canadian local governments continue to rely on private contractors to produce services for their residents. A key expectation for those who contract out services is that unit costs will be lower than the costs incurred if public crews and equipment produced the same service. A principal reason for expecting lower costs is the assumption that private contractors are exposed to competition that induces companies to operate with mixes of capital, labour and technologies that are more efficient. This article compares public and contracted private production of residential solid‐waste collection in 327 local governments across Canada. Three complementary hypotheses that are grounded in the theory and research on local public economies are tested. The findings generally support contracting‐out as a way to reduce unit costs, although substantial public‐private differences occur only in communities less than 10,000 population. Further, where communities have divided up their residential solid‐waste collection between public and private producers, overall costs are lower than national averages, and contracted companies are substantially less costly than their public counterparts in the same local governments. Finally, in communities that have contracted out this service, the competitiveness of the bidding practices affects unit costs. Local governments that bid the service competitively enjoy a cost saving compared to those that renew their contract with the existing company.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".