The aim of this paper is to carry out a literature review of the empirical studies on the efficiency of management modes in the urban public transport services (UPT). It comes to analysing the scientific papers that sought to determine, based on the frontier and econometric methods, the links between the choice of the management mode and performance within the provision of UPT services. The question that these studies are trying to answer is: Does the delivery of UPT services by a private operator, leads to better performance than when a public or mixed operator provides these services?