efficiency performance of current account bop flows in advanced world economies considering ghg emissions abstract current account ca imbalances reveal the unequal trade and foreign direct investment t fdi flows between various countries this paper investigates the performance of the ca component of the balance of payments bop of major advanced economies following the recent global financial and economic crisis 2013 2017 using a data envelopment analysis dea second stage approach slack based inefficiency sbi dea models are proposed using both a conventional perspective and a sustainability perspective that consider greenhouse gas ghg emissions as an undesirable output the efficiency assessment aims to identify output slacks i e exports and income inflows shortfalls as well as input slacks i e import and income outflows excesses in the second stage explanatory factors of the observed ca inefficiencies have been investigated using regression models under frequentist and bayesian frameworks although some differences exist between the conventional and sustainability scenarios regarding the negative effects of trade diversification and external debt and energy dependency on ca inefficiency in both scenarios the results indicate links between ca inefficiency and geographical regions socio economic development and the burden of customs procedures

political competition and the politicization of the state in east central europe the expansion and politicization of the postcommunist state even among the reform leaders of czech republic hungary poland and slovakia has confounded early expectations that the state would s

stochastic dea with ordinal data applied to a multi attribute pricing problem multiple attribute pricing problems are highly challenging due to the dynamic and uncertain features in the associated market in this paper we address the condominium multiple attribute pricing problem using data envelopment analysis dea in this study we simultaneously consider stochastic variables non discretionary variables and ordinal data and present a new type of dea model based on our proposed dea an effective performance measurement tool is developed to provide a basis for understanding the condominium pricing problem to direct and monitor the implementation of pricing strategy and to provide information regarding the results of pricing efforts for units sold as well as insights for future building design a case study is executed on a leading canadian condominium developer

law enforcement and transition abstract we present a simple model to analyze law enforcement problems in transition economies law enforcement implies coordination problems and multiplicity of equilibria due to a law abidance and a fiscal externality we analyze two institutional mechanisms for solving the coordination problem a first mechanism which we call dualism follows the scenario of chinese transition where the government keeps direct control over economic resources and where a liberalized non state sector follows market rules the second mechanism we put forward is accession to the european union we show that accession to the european union even without external borrowing provides a mechanism to eliminate the bad equilibrium provided the accessing country is small enough relative to the european union interestingly we show that accession without conditionality is better than with conditionality because conditionality creates a coordination problem of its own that partly annihilates the positive effects of expected accession

constant and variable returns to scale dea models for socially responsible investment funds abstract in order to evaluate the performance of socially responsible investment sri funds we propose some models which use data envelopment analysis dea and can be computed in all phases of the business cycle these models focus on the most crucial elements of an investment in mutual funds in the literature both constant and variable returns to scale dea models have been used to evaluate the performance of mutual funds we carry out an empirical investigation on european sri equity funds to test the presence of returns to scale rts another aspect taken into account by the empirical investigation is the measurement of the degree of social responsibility of sri equity funds in various european countries in addition we analyse the performance of the funds considered with the different dea models proposed which differ in the way the ethical objective is taken into account moreover the paper focuses on another crucial issue regarding socially responsible investing the comparison of the performances between sri and non sri funds the empirical study suggests that the ethical objective can be pursued without having to renounce financial rewards

a non radial dea approach to measuring environmental performance data envelopment analysis dea has gained great popularity in environmental performance measurement because it can provide a synthetic standardized environmental performance index when pollutants are suitably incorporated into the traditional dea framework past studies about the application of dea to environmental performance measurement often follow the concept of radial efficiency measures in this paper we present a non radial dea approach to measuring environmental performance which consists of a non radial dea based model for multilateral environmental performance comparisons and a non radial malmquist environmental performance index for modeling the change of environmental performance over time a case study of oecd countries using the proposed non radial dea approach is also presented it is found that the environmental performance of oecd countries as a whole has been improved from 1995 to 1997

multi factor performance measure model with an application to fortune 500 companies abstract the paper develops tools for reconciling diverse measures which characterize the financial performance of the fortune 500 companies the technology of data envelopment analysis dea is employed to determine a multi factor financial performance model which inherently recognizes tradeoffs among various financial measures this study offers an alternative perspective and characterization on the performance of the fortune 500 companies it is shown that the top ranked companies by revenue do not necessarily have top ranked performance viewed as being multidimensional only about 3 companies were operating on the best practice frontier substantial technical and scale inefficiencies are found decreasing returns to scale drs are uncovered among the relatively large revenue top ranked companies the study of congestion shows that a reduction in current levels of employees assets and equity may actually increase revenue and profit levels factor specific measures within the framework of multidimensional measure are developed to further study the performance of companies and industries the performance of best practice frontier companies is analyzed by constructing reference share measures which indicate the role each frontier company plays in evaluating non frontier companies finally the reliability of the best practice frontier is examined

efficiency analysis for exogenously fixed inputs and outputs we evaluate by means of mathematical programming formulations the relative technical and scale efficiencies of decision making units dmus when some of the inputs or outputs are exogenously fixed and beyond the discretionary control of dmu managers this approach further develops the work on efficiency evaluation and on estimation of efficient production frontiers known as data envelopment analysis dea we also employ the model to provide efficient input and output targets for dmu managers in a way that specifically accounts for the fixed nature of some of the inputs or outputs we illustrate the approach using real data for a network of fast food restaurants

commercial branch performance evaluation and results communication in a canadian bank a dea application abstract in this paper we focus on evaluating the performance of the commercial branches of a large canadian bank using data envelopment analysis two production models are considered in this country wide evaluation one model looking directly at resource usage is most useful to the branch manager the other model incorporating financial results is more geared towards senior management we introduce non discretionary factors to reflect specific aspects of the environment a branch is operating in such as risk and economic growth rate of the region both input and output multipliers are constrained by incorporating market prices as well as managerial preferences in order to get effectiveness measures the cost minimisation study led to valuable results pertaining to the performance of individual branches notable is the methodology introduced here that shows how to present graphical and numeric outcomes to managers gap maps pie charts and target tables are produced for each branch to provide performance goals for the managers useful information has also been obtained at the district level output oriented models were analysed to reflect the bank s recent emphasis towards growth in some areas

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

agriculture s environmental externalities dea evidence for french agriculture the existence of persistent technical inefficiency offers the opportunity for a free lunch not typically implied by the neoclassical theory of the firm when external effects are related to the use of particular inputs reduction of persistent technically inefficient levels of input use represents a means of reducing external impacts an important example is found in agriculture where substantial environmental impacts are generated by particular inputs within this context this paper considers the usefulness of data envelopment analysis dea for estimation of potential input reductions and assessment of potential reductions of environmental impacts of agricultural inputs an application for french cereal production provides estimates that indicate that substantial potential exists for reduction of input use and environmental impacts

efficiency and environmental factors in the us electricity transmission industry the electricity industry in most developed countries has been restructured over recent decades with the aim of improving both service quality and firm performance regulated segments e g transmission still provide the infrastructure for the competitive segments and represent a significant share of the total price paid by final customers however there is a lack of empirical studies that analyse firms performance in the electricity transmission sector in this paper an empirical analysis of us electricity transmission companies is conducted for the period 2001 2009 we use alternative stochastic frontier models that allow us to identify the determinants of firms inefficiency these models also permit us to control for weather conditions potentially one of the most decisive uncontrollable factors in electricity transmission our results suggest that weather conditions clearly have an influence on transmission costs and that there is room for improvement in the management of us electricity transmission systems regulators should also be aware that more adverse conditions generate higher levels of inefficiency and that achieving long term efficiency improvements tends to worsen firms short term relative performance

non parametric frontier estimates of mutual fund performance using c and l moments some specification tests there is a burgeoning literature using non parametric frontier methods to measure mutual fund performance these articles measure the relationship between the various characteristics mainly return information and some costs of ownership of these specialized financial products to establish a ranking using some efficiency measure we argue in favor of the use of the shortage function which is compatible with general investor preferences and question some of the often maintained hypotheses in this line of research the empirical part employs a large database of us and european mutual funds to offer extensive tests of the underlying modeling assumptions using various frontier estimators

political losers as a barrier to economic development per capita income in many sub saharan african countries such as chad and niger is less than 1 30th of that of the united states most economists and social scientists suspect that this is in part due to institutional failures that stop these societies from adopting the best technologies a particularly interesting historical example comes from the diffusion of railways in the 19th century while railways are regarded as a key technology driving the industrial revolution there were large lags in their diffusion for example in 1850 the united states had 14 518 km of track britain 9 797 km and germany 5 856 km in the russian and hapsburg empires there were just 501 km and 1 357 kim respectively all data from brian r mitchell 1993 why do societies as in this example fail to adopt the best available technologies one answer is that existing powerful interest groups block the introduction of new technologies in order to protect their economic rents and societies are able to make technological advances only if they can defeat such groups economic monopolies may be one example a monopolist might wish to block the introduction of a new technology by a rival that will capture the market this idea which we call the economic losers hypothesis was discussed by simon kuznets 1968 developed at length by joel mokyr 1990 in the context of technology adoption and formalized by per krusell and jose victor rios rull 1996 and stephen l parente and edward c prescott 1997 related ideas are widely discussed in the literature on international trade policy with many formal models e g gene m grossman and elhanan helpman 1994 there are problems with this story however first despite the intuitive appeal of the idea there are relatively few instances where major economic change was blocked by economic losers mokyr 1990 emphasizes the attempts of many skilled artisans to block the introduction of new machines the most famous example is the luddites skilled weavers who were thrown out of work by mechanization interestingly however many of these groups including the luddites were ultimately unable to block economic progress equally important the economic losers hypothesis relies on the presumption that certain groups have the political power to block innovation but if so why not use this power to simply tax the gains generated by the introduction of the new technology this might be because there are limits on the nature of fiscal instruments though it seems plausible that groups with sufficient political power to block innovation would be able subsequently to lobby effectively for redistribution a more important reason however may be that the introduction of new technology and economic change more generally may simultaneously affect the distribution of political power we argue that the effect of economic change on political power is a key factor in determining whether technological advances and beneficial economic changes will be blocked in other words we propose a political loser hypothesis we argue that it is groups whose political power not economic rents is eroded who will block technological advances if agents are economic losers but have no political power they cannot impede technological progress if they have and maintain political power i e are not political losers then they have no incentive to block progress it is therefore agents who have t discussant gene grossman princeton university

are hospitals seasonally inefficient evidence from washington state efficiency measurement has been one of the most extensively explored areas of health services research over the past two decades despite this attention few studies have examined whether a provider s efficiency varies on a monthly quarterly or other sub annual basis this article presents an empirical study that looks for evidence of seasonal inefficiency using a quarterly panel of general acute care hospitals from washington state we find that hospital efficiency does vary over time however the nature of this dynamic inefficiency depends on the type of efficiency being measured our results suggest that technical and cost efficiency vary by quarter allocative and scale efficiency also vary on a quarterly basis but only if the data are jointly disaggregated by quarter and another firm specific factor such as size or operating status thus future research corporate decisions and government policies designed to improve the efficiency of hospital care need to account for seasonal trends in hospi

non discretionary and discretionary factors and scale in data envelopment analysis abstract this paper discusses the interpretation of exogenously fixed non discretionary factors in data envelopment analysis dea and suggests a generalised model for incorporating different types of inputs and outputs in dea the paper first compares two approaches to the inclusion of continuous non discretionary factors in a one stage model one introduced by banker and morey operat res 34 4 1986 513 521 and the other by lovell top 2 1994 175 248 and ruggiero eur j operat res 90 1996 553 565 the approaches are compared theoretically on the basis of axiomatic systems and empirically on the basis of examples and simulated data the key difference is that some models require non discretionary factors to be scale independent i e indices and some require them to be scale dependent i e volume measures also the returns to scale properties vary depending on the manner in which non discretionary factors are treated in practice we may want to utilise the properties of the different models simultaneously a generalised dea model allowing for this possibility is presented

efficiency of mutual funds and portfolio performance measurement a non parametric approach abstract in finance portfolio performance assessment is an important area of research the two popular indices of performance are the jensen s alpha and the sharpe index however there are a number of shortcomings of the above measures that have been highlighted in the literature we propose a new measure of performance that seeks to address the limitations of the earlier indices the new index is calculated by employing a well known method in operations research called data envelopment analysis we show the benefits of the proposed approach and assess the performance of mutual funds we compare the results with traditional indices of performance an interesting result we obtain is that the mutual funds are all approximately mean variance efficient

measuring and forecasting regional environmental and economic efficiency in italy abstractenvironmental and economic efficiency has being receiving growing attention among researchers in general terms this concept is related to the capability of the economic systems to employ natural resources efficiently so as to increase economic and human wealth this clearly implies that both the economic and ecological aspects of decisions ought to be considered bearing this in mind this article considers economic and ecological performance together by applying data envelopment analysis and the malmquist productivity index to investigate the efficiency of the 20 italian regions from 2004 to 2011 the results reveal that the northern regions have been more efficient than the southern ones highlighting the strong geographical differences between the two furthermore this article uses the grey system theory to forecast regional economic and environmental efficiency the results of the forecasting analysis show that the north south duality remains strong and will possibly increase since the r

after the big bang obstacles to the emergence of the rule of law in post communist societies when russia launched mass privatization it was widely believed that it would create a powerful constituency for the rule of law that didn t happen we present a dynamic equilibrium model of the political demand for the rule of law and show that beneficiaries of mass privatization may fail to demand the rule of law even if it is the pareto efficient rule of the game the reason is that uncertainty about the legal regime can lead to asset stripping and stripping can give agents an interest in prolonging the absence of the rule of law this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

economies of diversification a generalization and decomposition of economies of scope abstract the paper investigates the benefits of diversification for a multi product firm it examines economies of diversification reflecting the cost reduction associated with producing outputs in an integrated firm compared to specialized firms the analysis applies under complete specialization as well as partial specialization when firms are not fully specialized and or when the specialization scheme does not cover all outputs it decomposes economies of diversification into four additive parts a part measuring complementarity among outputs a part reflecting economies of scale a part reflecting convexity and a part reflecting the role of fixed cost this new decomposition appears useful in investigating how scale effects complementarity effects and convexity effects can contribute to economies of scope in a multiproduct firm and helps generate valuable insights into the economics of specialization for multiproduct firms

benchmarking urban energy efficiency in the uk this study asks what is the best way to measure urban energy efficiency there has been recent interest in identifying efficient cities so that best practices can be shared a process known as benchmarking previous studies have used relatively simple metrics that provide limited insight on the complexity of urban energy efficiency and arguably fail to provide a fair measure of urban performance using a data set of 198 urban uk local administrative units three methods are compared ratio measures regression residuals and data envelopment analysis the results show that each method has its own strengths and weaknesses regarding the ease of interpretation ability to identify outliers and provide consistent rankings efficient areas are diverse but are notably found in low income areas of large conurbations such as london whereas industrial areas are consistently ranked as inefficient the results highlight the shortcomings of the underlying production based energy accounts ideally urban energy efficiency benchmarks would be built on consumption based accounts but interim recommendations are made regarding the use of efficiency measures that improve upon current practice and facilitate wider conversations about what it means for a specific city to be energy efficient within an interconnected economy

estimating technical and allocative efficiency in the public sector a nonparametric analysis of dutch schools abstract public sector output provision is influenced not only by discretionary inputs but also by exogenous environmental factors in this paper we extended the literature by developing a conditional dea estimator of allocative efficiency that allows a decomposition of overall cost efficiency into allocative and technical components while simultaneously controlling for the environment we apply the model to analyze technical and allocative efficiency of dutch secondary schools the results reveal that allocative efficiency represents a significant 37 percent of overall cost efficiency on average although technical inefficiency is still the dominant part furthermore the results show that the impact of environment largely differs between schools and that having a more unfavorable environment is very expensive to schools these results highlight the importance of including environmental variables in both technical and allocative efficiency analysis

evaluating the operational efficiency of major ports in the asia pacific region using data envelopment analysis in recent years as competition among international ports has intensified the impartial and objective evaluation of port operational efficiency has become increasingly important in enabling each individual port to understand its peculiar strengths and weaknesses as well as any immediate threats or opportunities that may affect its competitive environment this study applies ccr model bcc model and 3 stage dea model to evaluate the changes in efficiency that have taken place between 1998 and 2001 in 10 ports in the asia pacific region using cross period data the empirical results show that different model will lead to different result on average the efficiency estimated by 3 stage dea procedure is the highest while ccr efficiency is the lowest it should be noted that the efficiencies based on ccr and bcc model are somewhat lower than the 3 stage dea approaches because they do not take the environmental factors managerial inefficiency and statistical noises into account

efficiency measures and productivity indexes in the context of university library benchmarking data envelopment analysis dea has attracted considerable attention during the last few decades as an intuitively clear method for performance assessment theoretical developments have taken turns with empirical efficiency studies in this paper we empirically analyse performance differences across university libraries from different countries from a cross section and a longitudinal perspective we use the malmquist index approach to disentangle environmental efficiency from technical efficiency te to highlight performance differences eventually induced by environmental factors beyond the control of library management as well as to decompose productivity changes over time into changes in te and changes in technology in our cross section analysis we found that north american na libraries are more productive at higher input levels than the european libraries from germany and austria at which we looked in this contribution moreover the largest na libraries are still able to improve performance as t

anticipating the consequences of school reform a new use of dea we use dea type linear programming techniques to simulate a basic component of educational reform eliminating restrictions on the allocation of school personnel our technique allows us to identify potential output gains or equivalently potential cost savings from reform we can also identify which personnel groups are likely to gain and lose under this reform when we apply our model to a sample of texas school districts we find evidence that the educational establishment has substantial economic rents to protect from school reform and that the primary beneficiaries of reform are likely to be affluent school districts with few minority students the technique which relies on the relationship between the direct and indirect distance functions can be easily generalized to measure the potential gains from removing other input restrictions such as union work rules environmental regulations or deed restrictions

estimating most productive scale size using data envelopment analysis abstract the relation between the most productive scale size mpss for paparticular input and output mixes and returns to scale for multiple inputs multiple outputs situations is explicitly developed this relation is then employed to extend the applications of data envelopment analysis dea introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes ccr to the estimation of most productive scale sizes for convex production possibility sets it is then shown that in addition to productive inefficiencies at the actual scale size the ccr efficiency measure also reflects any inefficiencies due to divergence from the most productive scale size two illustrations of the practical applications of these results to the estimation of most productive scale sizes and returns to scale for hospitals and stem electric generation plants are also provided emphasize the advantage of this method in examining specific segments of the efficient production surface

assessing the performance of alternative investments using non parametric efficiency measurement approaches is it convincing abstract dea based performance assessment in the alternative investment fund industry is often motivated by the fact that dea is capable of simultaneously handling multiple input risk and multiple output return measures thereby still offering a single real number as a performance index without utilizing subjective weights to aggregate these inputs and outputs this paper aims at investigating whether dea based performance indexes previously used to assess alternative investment fund performance are actually able to satisfy these properties and to contrast the findings using a dea based performance index with those using a traditional financial performance index

a partial adjustment approach to evaluating and measuring the business value of information technology abstract in this paper we develop a partial adjustment approach based on the theory of partial adjustment to assess the value of information technology we also propose a performance measure derived from the approach the constrained structural or implicit and unconstrained non structural or explicit models derived from the approach are fitted into a set of panel data at the country level covering the period from 1993 to 2006 for a sample of 12 countries including the g7 nations and are estimated by the seemingly unrelated regression estimation the results produced by the models are robust with respect to the choice of the production function representing the true desired or maximum output and challenge the widely held belief that the productivity paradox has disappeared and the view that the productivity paradox exists in developing economies only the proposed approach compares favorably with the time varying stochastic production frontier approach since it is easier and simpler to apply but unlike the non parametric data envelopment analysis approach it is parametric

nonparametric analysis of educational costs abstract traditional economic analyses of the public sector that assume cost minimization are not consistent with political models of bureaucracy if costs are not minimized then estimated cost functions will be biased the purpose of this paper is to provide a flexible nonparametric technique based on farrell type efficiency measures to estimate public sector costs standard indices need to be modified to fit the special nature of public sector service provision which is characterized by an influence of exogenous variables on cost a useful by product is an index of environmental harshness faced by local governments for illustrative purposes this technique is applied to a sample of new york state school districts it is found that nearly 64 of districts are cost inefficient spending on average 1200 per pupil above the cost minimizing level in addition it is estimated that the average school district faces environmental cost of over 1700 per pupil

exiting a lawless state an earlier paper showed that an economy could be trapped in an equilibrium state in which the absence of the rule of law led to asset stripping and the prevalence of asset stripping led to the absence of a demand for the rule of law highlighting a coordination failure this paper looks more carefully at the dynamics of transition from a non rule of law state the paper identifies a commitment problem as the critical feature inhibiting the transition the inability under a rule of law to forgive theft this can lead to the perpetuation of the non rule of law state even when it might seem that the alternative is pareto improving

a two stage dea approach for quantifying and analysing the inefficiency of conventional and organic rain fed cereals in spain abstract this paper assesses the efficiency of rain fed cereals crops grown in southern spain the proposed approach uses a two stage data envelopment analysis dea plus regression approach in the first stage a slacks based inefficiency sbi dea model is used to project conventional and organic cropping systems onto the efficient frontier the results of the efficiency analysis show that conventional production is more inefficient than organic production and that the main sources of inefficiency in the case of conventional production correspond to excessive input consumption and ghg emissions in the case of organic production the inefficiency comes from output shortfalls it is shown that reducing inefficiency would reduce the amount of ghg emitted per unit of fresh matter yielded this potential gain is more pronounced in the case of conventional production but also occurs for organic production in the second stage the crops efficiency scores are regressed against some exogenous variables using a fractional regression model the regression results confirm that organic production significantly decreases inefficiency and they also indicate that the larger the farm the larger the inefficiency and that growing barley is more inefficient than wheat

the impossibility of convex constant returns to scale production technologies with exogenously fixed factors abstract the extensions to the variable vrs and the constant crs returns to scale models developed by banker and morey are considered among the main approaches to the incorporation of exogenously fixed factors in models of data envelopment analysis dea recently syrjanen showed that the banker and morey crs technology is not convex taking into account that its subset vrs technology is explicitly assumed convex this observation leads to difficulties with explaining the fundamental production assumptions of the crs extension motivated by the example of syrjanen the contribution of this paper is twofold first we show that the nonconvex banker and morey crs technology is nevertheless a suitable reference technology for the assessment of scale efficiency second we ask if a convex technology could be constructed that would correct the nonconvexity of the crs technology of banker and morey the answer to this is negative one consequence of assuming both convexity and ray unboundness with fixed exogenous factors is that we can always mix and match discretionary and nondiscretionary factors taken from different units arriving at totally unrealistic production plans this demonstrates that generally there exists no meaningful convex crs technology with exogenously fixed factors that can be used in its own right apart from its use as a reference technology in the measurement of scale efficiency

an evaluation of the efficiency of quebec s school boards using the data envelopment analysis method in this paper the efficiency of quebec s school boards during a period of severe cutbacks in their finance is examined using data envelopment analysis the average efficiency is found to be relatively high in spite of this potential savings could be achieved if school boards were fully efficient results were found to depend heavily on school boards socio economic conditions thus they were subjected to tobit analysis and the boards corrected efficiencies recalculated it is concluded that inefficiencies cost 800 million dollars of which 200 million dollars come from unfavourable socio economic conditions

energy efficiency measurement in agriculture with imprecise energy content information abstract measuring energy efficiency is crucial when planning energy reduction policies however decision makers are understandably reluctant to act in the absence of solid data and results supporting a policy position this paper proposes a methodology to measure the energy efficiency of farms based on the data envelopment analysis dea approach in a manner similar to the cost framework we decompose energy efficiency measurements into technical and allocative efficiencies in energy contents of inputs in this study we replace input prices used in traditional economic efficiency measurements by their energy content we use the energy efficiency model to explore the optimal input mix that produces the current outputs at minimum energy consumption we demonstrate that this decomposition can help policy makers design accurate energy policies however the uncertainty of the data and more particularly the energy content of the inputs leads us to recommend using the methodologies to calculate the bounds of efficiency to obtain more plausible and robust results based on our analysis energy efficiency is not a fixed value and policy makers should consider it with caution we use a 2007 database of french farms specialised in field crops for empirical illustration

a conditional directional distance function approach for measuring regional environmental efficiency evidence from uk regions abstract this paper by using conditional directional distance functions as introduced by simar and vanhems j econometrics 166 2012 342 354 modifies the model by fare and grosskopf eur j operat res 157 2004 242 245 and examines the link between regional environmental efficiency and economic growth the proposed model using conditional directional distance functions incorporates the effect of regional economic growth on regions environmental efficiency levels the results from uk regional data reveal a negative relationship between regions gdp per capita and environmental inefficiency up to a certain gdp per capita level after that level it appears that the relationship becomes positive as an overall result the regional environmental inefficiency gdp per capita relationship appears to have a u shape form

a data envelopment analytic model for assessing the relative efficiency of the selling function abstract this paper presents a data envelopment analytic model for assessing the relative efficieny of sales units that simultaneously incorporates multiple sales outcomes controllable and uncontrollable resources and environmental factors the model enables comparisons among a reference set of sales units engaged in selling the same product service by deriving a single summary measure of relative sales efficiency in addition it provides insights into modifications that are necessary in order to enhance relative efficiency of an individual sales unit conditions when the sales unit has additional control over resources are explored and the effects on relative efficiency are examined an illustration of the model in the context of sales units from a sample of insurance companies demonstrates the critical features of the model

data envelopment analysis with resource constraints an alternative model with non discretionary factors abstract it is shown that supplying additional resources in order to achieve full efficiency is equivalent to expansion of the input output space with additional factors that are non discretionary resource intensive and resource extensive efficiencies are introduced and defined a numerical example is given

externalities and complementarities in telecommunications dynamics abstract this paper focuses on the complementarities between the international diffusion of computers and the variance in the levels of telecommunications revenue per installed line in 30 countries the economic analysis elaborates on the marshallian notion of derived demand the hypothesis is that the increasing variance in the levels of telecommunications traffic per line across countries is a consequence of the growing levels of computer communication which in turn can be approximated by the diffusion of computers empirical analysis confirms the strong positive correlation between computer density and telecommunications intensity

spatial statistical methods applied to the 2015 brazilian energy distribution benchmarking model accounting for unobserved determinants of inefficiencies abstract in 2015 the brazilian regulator presented a dea benchmarking model to set the regulatory operational cost goals to be reached in four years for 61 electricity distribution utilities the dea model uses adjusted operational cost as the input variable seven output variables and weight restrictions although non discretionary variables or environmental variables are available in the dataset the regulator argued that no statistically significant correlation was found between the dea efficiency scores and the non discretionary variables this study evaluates the statistical correlation between the dea efficiency scores and the available environmental variables spatial statistic methods are used to show that the efficiency scores are geographically correlated furthermore due to brazil s environmental diversity and large territory it is unlikely that only one environmental component is sufficient to adjust inefficiencies across the brazilian territory thus a new combined environmental variable is proposed finally a second stage model using the proposed environmental variable and accounting for a spatial latent structure is presented results show major differences between original and corrected efficiency scores mainly for utilities located in harsh environments and which originally achieved lower efficiency scores

the design of reform packages under uncertainty the authors present a model of large scale economic reforms modeled on the transition process in eastern europe with aggregate and individual uncertainty concerning the outcome of reforms the government is assumed to choose the speed and sequencing of reforms the authors compare big bang strategies with gradualist reform packages they show that gradualist reform packages may be easier to get started optimal sequencing of reforms should aim at creating constituencies for further reforms and gradualism may generate a higher investment response because of a lower option value of waiting than would a big bang approach copyright 1995 by american economic association

when does privatization work the impact of private ownership on corporate performance in the transition economies this paper compares the performance of privatized and state firms in the transition economies of central europe while controlling for various forms of selection bias it argues that privatization has different effects depending on the types of owners to whom it gives control in particular privatization to outsider but not insider owners has significant performance effects where privatization is effective the effect on revenue performance is very pronounced but there is no comparable effect on cost reduction overlooking the strong revenue effect of privatization to outsider owners leads to a substantial overstatement of potential employment losses from postprivatization restructuring

markowitz revisited social portfolio engineering abstract in recent years socially responsible investing has become a popular subject with both private and institutional investors at the same time a number of scientific papers have been published on socially responsible investments sris covering a broad range of topics from what actually defines sris to the financial performance of sri funds in contrast to non sri funds in this paper we revisit markowitz portfolio selection theory and propose a modification allowing to incorporate not only asset specific return and risk but also a social responsibility measure into the investment decision making process applied in an a posteriori fashion the model results in a three dimensional capital allocation plane illustrating the complete set of feasible optimal portfolios it enables investors to custom tailor their asset allocations and incorporate all personal preferences regarding return risk and social responsibility in an empirical analysis with a data set of over 6000 international companies including the complete universe of social responsibility rated stocks we find that investors opting to maximize the social impact of their investments do indeed face a statistically significant decrease in expected returns however the social responsibility risk optimal portfolio yields a statistically significant higher social responsibility rating than the return risk optimal portfolio

efficiency in the provision of public services a data envelopment analysis of uk public library systems this study assesses the relative efficiency of public library services by examining the relationship between library inputs and library outputs in multi outlet library systems differences in the size of the area and population served are reflected in differences in the number of outlets and mix of outlet types using a data envelopment analysis which controls for the accessibility of library resources this study derives technical and overall efficiency scores for 99 uk public library systems the data are survey observations for 1995 1996 over the decade leading up to the survey library services had been subject to a protracted period of budget restraint and contraction in most areas of activity the distribution of efficiency scores is skewed implying that although many library systems are efficient or near efficient there is a tail of inefficient operations inefficiency is mainly but not exclusively associated with over subscription to serial publications many library systems are scale ineffic

destination performance introducing the utility function in the mean variance space economic characteristics of home countries can cause considerable variations in the tourism demand for example the average level of expenditure per tourist varies from one origin to another and these variations may alter overtime thus different tourist nationalities are associated with different level of expenditures and risks therefore strategies aimed at minimizing the variations may become an important issue for the policy makers in this paper we aim to use the productivity measurement theory in a mean variance space to a french region nord pas de calais by introducing the utility function in a mean variance framework with this method we can calculate the optimal portfolio share for each origin and give some useful political advices to the policy decision makers to improve the performance of the tourist sector

piecewise loglinear estimation of efficient production surfaces linear programming formulations for piecewise loglinear estimation of efficient production surfaces are derived from a set of basic properties postulated for the underlying production possibility sets unlike the piecewise linear model of banker charnes and cooper banker r d a charnes w w cooper 1984 models for the estimation of technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis management sci 30 september 1078 1092 this approach permits the identification of increasing marginal products and estimation of the classical s shaped production functions methods are also provided for estimating technical inefficiencies and other production characteristics such as rates of substitution and transformation marginal products returns to scale and most productive scale sizes on the basis of observed production data the results of a simulation study are reported to illustrate the usefulness of this estimation method in empirical applications when there are a priori reasons to expect increasing marginal products in some regions of the production function a modified model is provided to extend this analysis to the situation of non competing outputs addressed by the bi extremal model of banker charnes cooper and schinnar banker r d a charnes w w cooper a schinnar 1981 a bi extremal principle for frontier estimation and efficiency evaluation management sci 27 december 1370 1382

business culture and tax evasion why corruption and the unofficial economy can persist abstract this paper shows that business and tax inspection culture can create multiple equilibria in bad equilibria high cheating and corruption increases in penalties or auditing can have perverse impacts and increase cheating the source of the multiple equilibria is the externalities created by business and tax inspection cultures as tax evasion and corruption become more common they become more acceptable and their cost is lowered a third externality that between firms and inspectors is the source of the perverse effect more cheating by firms is good for bribe taking inspectors and more bribe taking inspectors are good for cheating firms

efficiency and credit rating in taiwan banking data envelopment analysis estimation in this article we use the data envelopment analysis to measure the efficiency of banks before and after credit rating is taken into consideration and we also employ the malmquist productivity index to measure the total factor productivity changes from 2001 to 2003 the results are as follows 1 there is a positive relationship between the efficiency scores and credit rating and thus the credit rating can be a representative to evaluate the performance and quality of a bank 2 we use the wilconxon two sample test of nonparametric statistic to test the influences of credit rating the empirical result shows that the credit rating is proven to influence the efficiency of banks 3 the efficiency scores improve in both investment grade above tw bbb and speculation grade under tw bbb when credit rating is taken into consideration the empirical results show that the efficiency scores of banks with a high credit rating improved relatively more when compared to banks with a lower credit rating

finding the right yardstick regulation of electricity networks under heterogeneous environments abstract revenue cap regulation is often combined with systematic benchmarking to reveal the managerial inefficiencies when regulating natural monopolies one example is the european energy sector where benchmarking is based on actual cost data which are influenced by managerial inefficiency as well as operational heterogeneity this paper demonstrates how a conditional nonparametric method which allows comparison of firms operating under heterogeneous technologies can be used to estimate managerial inefficiency a dataset of 123 distribution firms in norway is used to show aggregate and firm specific effects of conditioning we compare the models presently used by the norwegian regulator to a suggested conditional model thus providing a viable alternative to distinguish between managerial inefficiency and operational heterogeneity the use of the conditional model in this regulatory context leads first to a decrease in aggregate efficient costs and second to a reallocation effect that affects the relative profitability of firms and relative customer prices thus providing a fairer basis for setting revenue caps

evaluating the cost efficiency of the italian banking system what can be learned from the joint application of parametric and non parametric techniques abstract research on bank efficiency has developed in two separate streams econometric studies and data envelopment analysis a linear programming technique these two branches of literature have developed quickly but separately in this paper these two approaches have been tested on a common panel of 270 italian banks and this has suggested the following i econometric and linear programming results do not differ dramatically when based on the same data and conceptual framework ii when differences arise they can be explained by going back to the intrinsic features of the models moreover some findings on italian banks may be of interest also to the international reader i efficiency scores show a high variance ii the banking system is split in two between northern and southern banks iii there is a direct rather than inverse relationship between productive efficiency and asset quality iv the efficiency of italian banks did not increase over the period 1988 1992

assessment of china transit and economic efficiencies in a modified value chains dea model abstract this study incorporates the concepts of undesirable intermediate intermediate input uncontrollable input and undesirable output to the value chains model chen and zhu 2004 thereby creating a modified value chains model to compute transit and economic efficiencies in 30 regions of china the modified value chains model forms a more general formulation to the value added chains in the utilization of the above concepts it also provides an optimal intermediate measure which differs from the independent two stage measure empirical evaluations indicate that large scale transit development in china s coastal area does not necessarily represent higher transit efficiency because in the coastal area there is a lack of significant positive relationships between transit and economic efficiency high economic efficiency does not contribute to greater transit efficiency the finding also suggests that by simultaneously decreasing the quantity in passenger and freight transport transit and economic efficiencies have greatly improved in most regions of china

sources of inefficiency in a representative democracy a dynamic analysis this paper studies the efficiency of policy choice in representative democracies it extends the citizen candidate model of democratic policy making to a dynamic environment equilibrium policy choices are shown to be efficient in the sense that in each period conditional on future policies being selected through the democratic process there exists no alternative current policy choices which can raise the expected utilities of all citizens however policies that would be declared efficient by standard economic criteria are not necessarily adopted in political equilibrium the paper argues that these divergencies are legitimately viewed as politicalfailures

performance of ethical mutual funds in spain sacrifice or premium there is currently much debate in the economic literature about whether ethical investment involves a financial sacrifice or premium one of the most common methods of testing this compares the financial performance of ethical investment funds with that of other funds not considered socially responsible or ethical the majority of these research studies evaluate the performance of the ethical funds according to classic measures whereby different financial markets in different countries and for different periods of time serve as reference for evaluation the ultimate conclusion of all of these studies is that there are no significant differences between the performance results of one type of funds and the other in spain ethical investment funds are still an incipient sector of investment to date the spanish market has not been included in any type of analysis of these characteristics therefore the main objective of this article is to compare the financial performance of ethical investment funds to that of other funds in the spanish retail market we propose the aggregate type of analysis as the spanish ethical investment funds have experienced a weaker development in comparison to those of other developed countries in the first step we suggest the financial performance to be compared by style analysis since the asset distribution of the spanish social return investment sri funds differs from the european trend in particular we use the multifactor regression model with style benchmarks we found that their financial performance is in all cases superior or similar to that achieved by the rest of the funds in the second step to achieve a more robust and homogeneous comparison we used the bootstrap method comparing ethical and non ethical fund subsamples by homogeneous groups no significant differences between these two types of funds have been found thus if we assume the positive o neutral effect of ethical investment on investor utility in the retail spanish market the financial and social performance fsp of ethical funds will be in aggregate superior to the fsp achieved by conventional funds in conclusion the financial performance of ethical mutual funds in spain is no sacrifice

sovereign bonds and socially responsible investment this article investigates how the mean variance efficient frontier defined by sovereign bonds of 20 developed countries is affected by the consideration of socially responsible indicators for countries in investment decision making for a global rating of socially responsible performances we show that it is possible to build portfolios with an increased average rating without significantly harming the risk return relationship this result differs when considering sub ratings related to the environment social concerns and public governance the results are good news for responsible investors and suggest that socially responsible portfolios of sovereign bonds can be built without a significant loss of mean variance efficiency

original sin good works and property rights in russia are property rights obtained through dubious means forever tainted with original sin or can right holders make their ill gotten gains legitimate by doing good works this is a critical question for developing and transition countries where privatization is often opaque and businesspeople may receive property but remain unwilling to use it productively due to concerns about the vulnerability of their rights to political challenge using a survey of 660 businesspeople conducted in russia in 2005 the author finds that the original sin of an illegal privatization is difficult to expunge contrary to a coasian view of privatization property rights transferred through a legally questionable privatization are seen as illegitimate long after privatization businesspeople however can improve the legitimacy of property rights by doing good works such as providing public goods and using their assets well finally managers who provide public goods for their region are more likely to invest in their firms than those who do not this suggests a possible political rationale for the provision of public goods by private firms these findings have implications for studies of privatization property rights and business state relations in transitions and developing countries

dea frontier improvement and portfolio rebalancing an application of china mutual funds on considering sustainability information disclosure abstract data envelopment analysis dea has been a widely used methodology for evaluating the relative performance of portfolios extensive work has appeared for realizing the role of dea in the aspect of assessing portfolio performance and deriving the relative rankings however the role of providing realizable benchmarks is not fully explored in the existing literatures most importantly the dea based portfolio performance evaluation methods developed in the existing literatures can hardly provide support for fund managers in pursuing sustainability performance in this paper we first propose a dea frontier improvement approach under the mean variance framework this approach provides investor with a rebalancing strategy as well as an improved dea frontier which approximates the portfolio efficient frontier better than the traditional dea model does then this approach is extended to a general return risk framework our in sample simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach for a wide range of applications in addition the out of sample tests show that the rebalancing investment strategies can achieve higher sharpe ratios and sortino ratios than those of the original ones finally we apply the proposed approach to evaluate mutual fund performance in china with the consideration of sustainability information disclosure we construct a disclosure index to indicate the extent of sustainable information disclosure of each mutual fund the results show that the proposed approach provides not only investment recommendations but also references for constructing sustainable green funds

small is not that beautiful after all measuring the scale efficiency of tunisian high schools using a dea bootstrap method allocation of resources to schools in a centrally managed state system as the tunisian one should depend on the performance of the individual institutions the optimal size is of crucial importance in this context and we need accurate measurement for sound policies this article discusses and implements a nonparametric statistical test procedure for organization scale efficiency this procedure allows us to test whether the observed scale efficiency is optimal or not using a smooth bootstrap methodology for efficiency measures estimated using data envelopment analysis dea methods because school principals do not control for the size of their institution i e the capital available at decision time the scale efficiency measures are defined so as to include quasi fixed inputs the results show that scale efficiency measures are subject to sampling variation we also found that the schools that are scale efficient are usually mid sized and large schools when size is measured by the number of students

is dea useful in the regulation of water utilities a dynamic efficiency evaluation the discussion about public utilities efficiency and its management has become increasingly important in the last decades we focus on the distribution of water which is one of the most important natural resources marshall 1879 this research shows the relationship between efficiency and institutional factors such as management system for this purpose we have data about some spanish water utilities under different provision systems during the period 1985 to 2000 using data envelopment analysis dea we estimate potential cost savings in this context we will extend the results obtained by thanassoulis 2000a b in attempt to guide the regulation of this sector

a dynamic general equilibrium analysis on fostering a hydrogen economy in korea hydrogen is anticipated to become one of the major alternative energy technologies for a sustainable energy system this study analyzes the dynamic economic impacts of building a hydrogen economy in korea employing a dynamic computable general equilibrium cge model as a frontier technology hydrogen is featured as having a slow diffusion rate due to option value positive externality resistance of old technology and complementary vintages without government intervention hydrogen derived energy will supply up to 6 5 of final energy demand by 2040 simulation outcomes show that as price subsidy rates increase by 10 20 and 30 hydrogen demand will increase by 9 2 15 2 and 37 7 respectively of final energy demand by 2040 the output of the transportation sector will increase significantly while demands for oil and electricity will decline demands for coal and lng will experience little change household consumption will decline because of the increase of income taxes overall gdp will increase because of the increase in exports and investments co2 emission will decline for medium and high subsidy rate cases but increase for low subsidy cases ultimately subsidy policy on hydrogen will not be an effective measure for mitigating co2 emission in korea when considering dynamic general equilibrium effects

the indian auto component industry estimation of operational efficiency and its determinants using dea in this paper the performance analysis of the indian auto component industry is carried out from the perspectives of an original equipment manufacturer and a component supplier various efficiency measures are estimated using data envelopment analysis with publicly available financial data on a representative sample of 50 firms the first stage analysis reveals various operational inefficiencies in the auto component industry which are subsequently decomposed into technical input mix and scale efficiencies the study finds evidence that a majority of the inefficient firms are operating in the diminishing returns to scale region and demonstrates potential savings through benchmark input targets a second stage analysis aimed at exploring root causes of inefficiencies finds that substitution of labour for capital could be causing a variety of inefficiencies including the input mix inefficiency in the indian component industry the empirical results also suggest that unlike the global auto supply chain higher average inventories are required for higher operational efficiencies in the indian context contrary to the popular expectations the technology licensing does not show significant influence on efficiency at least in the short term whereas efficient working capital management does result in higher operational efficiencies the study also unearths the need to reform labour laws which are significantly contributing to various inefficiencies in the indian component industry

a comparative application of data envelopment analysis and translog methods an illustrative study of hospital production this paper compares inferences about hospital cost and production correspondences from two different estimation models 1 the econometric modeling of the translog cost function and 2 the application of data envelopment analysis dea while there are numerous examples of the application of each approach to empirical data this paper provides insights into the relative strengths of the estimation methods by applying both models to the same data the translog results suggest that constant reruns are operant whereas the dea results suggest that both increasing and decreasing returns to scale may be observed in different segments of the production correspondence in turn suggesting that the translog model may be averaging diametrically opposite behavior on the other hand by examining the rate of output transformation both models agree that patient days devoted to care of children are more resource intensive than those devoted to adults or to the elderly in addition we compare estimates of technical efficiencies of individual hospitals obtained from the two methods the dea estimates are found to be highly related to the capacity utilization but no such relationship was found for the translog estimates this comparative application of different estimation models to the same data to obtain inferences about the nature of underlying cost and production correspondences sheds interesting light on the strengths of each approach and suggests the need for additional research comparing estimation models using real as well as simulated data

efficiency subsidies and environmental adaptation of animal farming under cap the purpose of this article is to model the interaction between the targets of the current cap environmental adaptation subsidies and efficiency q1 of animal farming to this end we first have to identify the production frontier and relative efficiency level for each animal oriented farm in the sample the production frontier and efficiency index for each type of farm assuming no specific production functions are identified using data envelope analysis dea techniques we then address the relationship between relative efficiency farm size and environmentally friendly behavior by carrying out a nonparametric regression of efficiency on economic size a proxy for the degree of environmental appropriateness and regional dummies calculations of the efficiency of the farms including direct subsidies are compared with the counterfactual exercise in the case in which direct subsidies are not considered finally we look for relations between subsidies and factors such as farm size efficiency and environmentally friendly behavior one key result shows that on average direct payments generally tend to increase efficiency however in most of the cases the mean efficiency decreases as the percentage of direct payments rises direct payments are found to be positively related to environmentally friendly production at least in germany however in general the direct payment system is not sufficient to offset the fact that the less environmentally friendly farms as well as the larger farms are more efficient

malmquist type indices in the presence of negative data an application to bank branches in this paper we develop an index and an indicator of productivity change that can be used with negative data for that purpose the range directional model rdm a particular case of the directional distance function is used for computing efficiency in the presence of negative data we use rdm efficiency measures to arrive at a malmquist type index which can reflect productivity change and we use rdm inefficiency measures to arrive at a luenberger productivity indicator and relate the two the productivity index and indicator are developed relative to a fixed meta technology and so they are referred to as a meta malmquist index and meta luenberger indicator we also address the fact that vrs technologies are used for computing the productivity index and indicator a requirement under negative data which raises issues relating to the interpretability of the index we illustrate how the meta malmquist index can be used not only for comparing the performance of a unit in two time periods but also for comparing the performance of two different units at the same or different time periods the proposed approach is then applied to a sample of bank branches where negative data were involved the paper shows how the approach yields information from a variety of perspectives on performance which management can use

an international comparison of hospital efficiency does institutional environment matter the consensus among many health economists is that no meaningful performance differences exist among for profit and non profit hospitals in the us but this topic has continued to be a matter of academic judicial and public policy interest a similar debate has ensued internationally regarding the potential efficiency gains from privatization of public enterprises in this paper we examine empirical evidence from the public highly regulated norwegian hospital sector and the private highly competitive and unregulated california hospital sector to ascertain whether institutional environment and level of market competition significantly affect the degree of productive efficiency in hospitals we compare and discuss the productive efficiency of four similar sets of hospitals operating in different institutional and competitive environments the four samples are carefully matched in the dimensions of sample size hospital size and average lengths of stay heterogeneity in output definition is used to co

who wants to revise privatization the complementarity of market skills and institutions using survey data from 28 transition countries we test for the complementarity and substitutability of market relevant skills and institutions we show that democracy and good governance complement market skills in transition economies under autocracy and weak governance institutions there is no significant difference in support for revising privatization between high and low skilled respondents as the level of democracy and the quality of governance increases the difference in the level of support for revising privatization between the high and low skilled grows dramatically this finding contributes to our understanding of microfoundations of the politics of economic reform

data envelopment analysis models of investment funds abstract this paper develops theory missing in the sizable literature that uses data envelopment analysis to construct return risk ratios for investment funds it explores the production possibility set of the investment funds to identify an appropriate form of returns to scale it discusses what risk and return measures can justifiably be combined and how to deal with negative risks and identifies suitable sets of measures it identifies the problems of failing to deal with diversification and develops an iterative approximation procedure to deal with it it identifies relationships between diversification coherent measures of risk and stochastic dominance it shows how the iterative procedure makes a practical difference using monthly returns of 30 hedge funds over the same time period it discusses possible shortcomings of the procedure and offers directions for future research

economic efficiency and frontier techniques abstract most of the literature related to the measurement of economic efficiency has based its analysis either on parametric or on non parametric frontier methods the choice of estimation method has been an issue of debate with some researchers preferring the parametric and others the non parametric approach the aim of this paper is to provide a critical and detailed review of both core frontier methods in our opinion no approach is strictly preferable to any other moreover a careful consideration of their main advantages and disadvantages of the data set utilized and of the intrinsic characteristics of the framework under analysis will help us in the correct implementation of these techniques recent developments in frontier techniques and economic efficiency measurement such as bayesian techniques bootstrapping duality theory and the analysis of sampling asymptotic properties are also considered in this paper

the evolution and main determinants of productivity in brazilian electricity distribution 1998 2005 an empirical analysis abstract this paper estimates changes in the productivity of the brazilian electricity distribution sector using data envelopment analysis dea on a panel of 18 firms from 1998 to 2005 the study decomposes the productivity change of these distribution firms in terms of technical efficiency scale efficiency and technical progress this exercise aims to help the understanding of the main determinants of the evolution of productivity focusing its relationship with the restructuring process implemented in the 1990s tfp index records a yearly positive growth rate of 1 3 in the whole period under analysis for all firms technical change was the main component behind this evolution with an average growth of 2 1 per year while technical efficiency presented a yearly negative performance of 0 8 the results prove that in general terms the incentives generated in the reform process do not seem to have led the firms to behave in a more efficient manner

a goal programming method of stochastic allocative data envelopment analysis abstract allocative data envelopment analysis adea is a version of data envelopment analysis dea which measures relative efficiency for a group of similar operating units with known input prices by using the actual input values adea provides information to managers on the minimum cost method of operation for each unit a major criticism of dea methods is that they are deterministic and have no means of allowing for uncertainty this paper applies the goal programming approach introduced by banker 1991 to allocative efficiency and develops the stochastic adea model a two stage solution method is introduced which is needed because of the existence of alternate optimal solutions regarding which units are found to be significantly inefficient we propose that identifying the significantly inefficient units is most useful to managers because it best facilitates improved efficiency the concept of a minimum frontier is introduced and used to define the significantly inefficient units we also show how bounds can be imposed which allow the ambiguity of the noise inefficiency trade off to be eliminated from the objective function the use of bounds also allows the identification of the significantly inefficient unit based on the amount of uncertainty present for each operating unit as a result of optimizing cost this method has the important advantage of being ideally suited for multiple outputs