international comparisons of productivity and its determinants in the natural gas industry the objective of this paper was to evaluate the performance of the natural gas industry using an inter country comparison of productivity level and its determinants three method ologies multilateral tornqvist productivity analysis managerial index system analysis and non parametric efficiency analysis are employed to make a methodological cross checking and to perform diversified analysis from the empirical results we identified the level and growth rate of productivity of individual firms the results also indicated that the korean gas industry has shown a relatively low level of productivity from the results of managerial performance index analysis we found that during the recent years of regulatory changes the final price of gas has decreased dramatically while the productivity growth has not been enough to offset the effect of decreased output price which has resulted in decreased profit we also examine the extent of the allocative scale and managerial efficiency as source components of the overall efficiency based on the performance of best practiced with the results of this study an effective policy measure could be established to improve the productivity and the overall managerial performance in the natural gas industry q 1999 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

examining structural breaks and growth rates in international health expenditures over the last decade there has been a growing interest in examining health expenditures in this paper we study the behaviour of health expenditures in the g3 countries usa the uk and japan and three european countries the uk switzerland and spain over the period 1960 2000 from a different perspective in that we examine 1 whether there is a common structural break in health expenditures across the g3 and european countries 2 whether structural breaks have slowed down health expenditure growth rates in these countries or vice versa our main findings are that 1 health expenditures share a common break in both bivariate and trivariate cases and structural breaks and break intervals suggest that either one or a combination of events second oil price shock the 1987 stock market crash and or recessions have contributed to the commonality of break in health expenditures in the g3 while the oil price shocks have been instrumental in the commonality of breaks for the european countries 2 except for the uk structural breaks have slowed down growth rates in health expenditures for the usa japan switzerland and spain

modelling the dynamics of a public health care system evidence from time series data the english national health service nhs was established in 1948 and has therefore yielded some long time series data on health system performance waiting time for inpatient care have been a persistent policy concern since the creation of the nhs after developing a simple theoretical framework of the dynamic interaction between key indicators of health system performance we investigate empirically the relationship between hospital activity waiting time and population characteristics using aggregate time series data for the nhs over the period 1952 to 2003 structural vector autoregression s var suggests that in the long run higher activity is associated with lower waiting times elasticity 0 9 an increase in the elderly population is associated with higher waiting time elasticity 1 3 in the short run higher lagged waiting time leads to higher activity elasticity 0 12 we also find that shocks in waiting times are countered by higher activity so the effect is only temporary

productivity and efficiency of us gas transmission companies a european regulatory perspective on both sides of the atlantic the regulation of gas transmission networks has undergone major changes since the early 1990s whereas in the us the long standing regime of cost plus regulation was complemented by increasing pipe to pipe competition most european countries moved towards incentive regulation complemented by market integration we study the productivity development of a panel of us interstate companies using data envelopment analysis and malmquist productivity indices results are presented for changes in productivity as well as for several convergence tests the results indicate that taking productivity and convergence as performance indicators regulation has been rather successful in particular during a period where overall demand was flat however we argue that a benchmarking based regulation might have brought about stronger convergence lessons for european regulators are twofold first the us analysis shows that benchmarking of european transmission operators would be possible if data were available second our results suggest that in the long run market integration and competition are alternatives to the current european model

on stationarity and cointegration of international health expenditure and gdp this paper examines stationarity and cointegration of health expenditure and gdp for a sample of 21 oecd countries using data for the period 1960 1997 by applying a test battery that allows robust inference to be made on the stationarity and cointegration issue trend stationarity and no cointegration are tested using new country by country and panel tests not previously applied in this setting new results for country by country and panel tests of non stationarity and cointegration are presented our unit root and trend stationarity results indicate that both health expenditure and gdp are non stationary the no cointegration and cointegration results indicate that health expenditure and gdp are cointegrated

technical change and efficiency measures the post privatisation in the gas distribution sector in argentina abstract in this paper we use a stochastic frontier approach to analyse the technical change in the post privatisation period in the gas distribution sector in argentina we found that there is both a catching up effect and a shift in the frontier which shows that the sector as a whole improved its efficiency in the reviewed period moreover this phenomenon holds not only for the average but also for every firm in the sample

can baumol s model of unbalanced growth contribute to explaining the secular rise in health care expenditure an alternative test in a recent paper i argued that baumol s model of unbalanced growth offers a ready explanation for the observed secular rise in health care expenditure hce in rich countries baumol s model implies that hce is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth i tested this hypothesis empirically using data from a panel of 19 organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries and found robust evidence in favour of baumol s theory an alternative way to test baumol s theory is to check whether its implication that variations in the relative price of medical care contribute significantly to explaining variations in health expenditure in the same direction has an empirical grounding earlier studies although mostly not in an explicit attempt to test baumol s theory have occasionally rejected this hypothesis despite poor data quality of the available medical price indices i perform the alternative test using data for nine oecd countries my findings suggest that the relat

health care expenditures and gdp panel data unit root test results abstract this short paper presents unit root test results for time series on per capita national health care expenditures and gross domestic product in the oecd unlike the country by country test used by hansen p king a 1996 the determinants of health care expenditure a cointegration approach j health econ 15 127 137 the test we employ exploits the panel nature of the oecd data using this approach we are able to reject the null hypothesis that these series contain unit roots no single test is likely to be definitive in this rapidly evolving area of econometric research however our results help to mitigate concern that panel data analyses of national health care expenditures are misspecified

does morbidity matter perceived health status in explaining the share of healthcare expenditures we argue that the demand for healthcare services can be better explained by individual need based variables rather than by macro variables such as the gross domestic product gdp per capita and the share of public healthcare expenditures this study introduces a self rated health variable called morbidity that describes individual needs for health care healthy individuals need less health care than sick ones and that is measured through personal interviews conducted by the organization for economic co operation and development oecd in addition stationary properties of the series are considered in order to understand the effect of shocks to expenditure behaviour on health care stationary test results show that we should not only use differenced values for the model variables but also incorporate time specific effects into the model using the appropriate specification and accounting for the time effect we find evidence supporting the hypothesis that the share of healthcare expenditure in gdp ris

efficiency and performance in gas distribution evidence from brazil this article analyses the current state of the gas distribution industry in brazil by identifying the main factors that determine its efficiency in order to test the performance of the industry we have calculated the firms technical efficiency during the period 2001 2009 we analyse whether some economic and technological factors as consumer density load factor or regulation among others have affected the performance of this industry we show that companies serving markets with different customer characteristics diversification have reached higher levels of efficiency and evolved faster moreover the private ownership and price cap regulation are more efficient in relation to public ownership and cost of service regulation these findings are important to support the improvement of the regulation of gas distribution in the brazilian states

population aging in healthcare a minor issue evidence from switzerland our study shows that population aging substantially affects healthcare expenditure hce this conclusion supports the popular but recently strongly contested view that the coming population aging will threaten the fiscal sustainability of health systems we contribute to this debate first by estimating the determinants of swiss healthcare expenditure hce with outlier robust dynamic regressions and second by projecting swiss hce based on the estimates produced and new population scenarios medical advances and gdp per capita also play a decisive role governments can mitigate hce growth by improving the health status of the population and by stimulating cost effective and productive medical advances

an analysis of technology productivity and regulatory distortion in the interstate natural gas transmission industry 1977 1985 the purpose of this paper is to provide the first comprehensive firm level analysis of cost structures and production in the interstate pipeline industry during the transition from price regulation to partial deregulation 1977 85 the regulatory changes during this period were numerous and complex we do not attempt to isolate the impact of any single change in regulation rather we examine how the regulatory environment as a whole affected the industry our study is based on a newly constructed panel of twenty four interstate pipeline firms we give particular attention to the impact of output change technical change scale economies and non optimal input allocation on total factor productivity growth and the implication of the 1978 natural gas policy act partial price decontrol relative to total wellhead price decontrol for residential commercial utility and industrial consumers of natural gas and for the transport industry itself 1998 john wiley sons ltd

explaining the inefficiency of electrical distribution companies peruvian firms this paper investigates the extent to which the structural reform of the peruvian electricity market implemented in the 1990s has improved the efficiency of the distribution companies and it evaluates the influence on efficiency of firm specific explanatory variables to do this we rely on data from 14 distribution companies between 1996 and 2006 the results indicate that the incentives generated by the reform process led to the firms becoming more efficient moreover the time trend and private management of the distribution companies are variables that positively affect the levels of efficiency whereas the lower network densities are then the greater the inefficiency

is health care really a luxury much of the work which has led to a widely held view that the income elasticity of health care spending exceeds one has been based on international cross section data or on pooled cross sections and time series in this paper we re examine this view in the context of long run equilibrium relationships between non stationary time series possibly including autonomous trends our results cast doubt upon the usefulness of pooling and upon the notion of an elasticity above one

firm size and productivity evidence from the electricity distribution industry in brazil in this paper we apply stochastic frontier analysis through a distance function to investigate the impact of firm size on productivity development in electricity distribution we use a sample of seventeen brazilian firms from 1998 to 2005 and decompose productivity into technical efficiency scale efficiency and technical change moreover a further step is to decompose the technical change measurement into several components the results indicate that firm size is important for industry s productivity and therefore a key aspect to consider when making decisions that affect the market structure in the electricity distribution industry

measuring and decomposing productivity change measuring productivity change with malmquist indices has become common practice because they are easily computed using nonparametric programming techniques and can be readily decomposed into technical and efficiency change however this approach is nonstochastic and requires a constant returns to scale assumption to construct the reference technology we propose estimating productivity change using a stochastic input distance frontier imposing no restrictions on returns to scale we derive the analogous decomposition of productivity change and develop a generalized method of moments strategy in which outputs or inputs may be endogenous we compare two methods in an application to electric utilities

new panel results on cointegration of international health expenditure and gdp this article tests for existence of cointegration between health expenditure and gdp using data from 25 oecd countries for the period 19607ndash 1997 the empirical modelling is based on a heterogeneous bivariate vector error correction panel model that allows for trending data as well as intercepts and trends in the cointegrating relations univariate country by country and panel unit root tests generally fail to reject the null of a unit root in the health expenditure and gdp variables country by country results based on the johansen multivariate likelihood based inference indicate somewhat mixed results on country specific cointegration with a rank of one found for 12 countries and a rank of zero for the remaining 13 countries application of a new panel test for cointegration rank with higher power than the individual tests indicates that health expenditure and gdp are cointegrated around linear trends

are health expenditures and gdp characterized by asymmetric behaviour evidence from 11 oecd countries in this article we examine whether per capita health expenditures and per capita gdp for 11 oecd countries can be characterized by asymmetric behaviour we achieve this goal by using the nonparametric triples test suggested by randles et al 1980 we examine two forms of asymmetries namely deepness and steepness our main finding is that for 6 out of 11 countries namely for the usa the uk japan spain finland and iceland either per capita health expenditures or per capita gdp are characterized by asymmetric behaviour this finding to some extent casts doubt on those studies that model the relationship between health and gdp using unit root and cointegration tests that assume symmetric disturbances

frontier estimation and firm specific inefficiency measures in the presence of heteroscedasticity the purpose of this article is to illustrate a straightforward and useful method for addressing the problem of heteroscedasticity in the estimation of frontiers a heteroscedastic cost frontier model is developed and estimated using bank cost data similar to that used by ferrier and lovell our results show dramatic changes in the estimated cost frontier and in the inefficiency measures when accounting for heteroscedasticity in the estimation process we find that the rankings of firms by their inefficiency measures is affected markedly by the correction for heteroscedasticity but not by alternative distributional assumptions about the one sided error term

cost efficiency in the swiss gas distribution sector this paper studies the cost structure of gas distribution utilities in switzerland three stochastic frontier models are applied to a panel of 26 companies operating from 1996 to 2000 efficiency is assumed to be constant over time the analysis highlights the importance of output characteristics such as customer density and network size the results suggest that the utilities could slightly reduce their operating costs by improving efficiency there is no evidence of significant unexploited scale economies however our analysis indicates that the estimates of scale economies could be sensitive to the assumptions regarding the variation of output with output characteristics

saving investment and capital mobility in eu member countries a panel data analysis of the feldstein horioka puzzle in this paper we reexamine the long standing and puzzling correlation between national saving and investment in 14 european union eu countries we employ a panel data set for the period 1970 201

technical efficiency of european railways a distance function approach this study has two principal objectives the first objective is to measure and compare the performance of european railways the second objective is to illustrate the usefulness of econometric distance functions in the analysis of production in multioutput industries where behavioural assumptions such as cost minimization or profit maximization are unlikely to be applicable using annual data on 17 railways companies during 1988 1993 multioutput distance functions are estimated using corrected ordinary least squares cols the resulting technical efficiency estimates range from 0 980 for the netherlands to 0 784 for italy with a mean of 0 863 the distance function results are also compared with those obtained from single output production functions where aggregate output measures are formed using either total revenue or a tornqvist index the results obtained indicate substantial differences in parameter estimates and technical efficiency rankings casting significant doubt upon the reliability of

the determinants and effects of health expenditure in developed countries previous studies of international differences in health spending have been restricted to the use of relatively small samples of cross sectional data our objective here is to re examine the results of previous work using a sample of 560 pooled time series and cross section observations results confirm the importance of gdp as a determinant of health spending with an estimated income elasticity at or around unity but also suggest that oecd countries should not be regarded as a single homogeneous group the importance of some non income variables is also confirmed although the direct effect of these factors appears to be small

efficiency performance and regulation of the international gas industry a bootstrap dea approach abstract natural gas has become increasingly important as a source of energy in recent years it is widely viewed as an attractive means of realizing environmental objectives post kyoto and individual country gas industries have been extensively restructured to encourage investment from the private sector barriers to international trade in gas have fallen particularly in areas such as europe and asia as pipeline facilities have expanded and trading systems have become established an important question for policy makers concerns the use of scarce resources by this expanding industry regulatory authorities increasingly use efficiency comparators to incentivise minimum cost use of resources by price cap methods yardstick competition and other techniques this paper explores some of the policy developments which affect efficiency of resource use in the gas industry and uses data envelopment analysis to measure relative performance at the individual country level recent developments in bootstrapping techniques are used to correct efficiency estimates for bias and to assess the uncertainty surrounding such estimates the implications of these results for regulatory authorities are then explored

the oil price shocks and the unit root hypothesis the uk experience critics of the standard dickey fuller and augmented dickey fuller tests for unit roots argue that when there have been significant structural breaks during the sample period these tests are often biased toward acceptance allowing for a one time change in the slope of the trend function often leads to rejection of the unit root hypothesis which implies that business cycles are temporary fluctuations around a stable but possibly shifting trend path the validity of the unit root hypothesis in connection with the two oil crises in the seventies is re examined using quarterly time series data for a set of uk macroeconomic series the empirical evidence presented supports the view that only those shocks associated with the oil price crises had a persistent effect on the uk economy

performance and efficiency in colombia s power distribution system effects of the 1994 reform we assess evolution in performance efficiency and productivity of colombia s power distribution utilities before and after the 1994 regulatory reform that introduced electricity market activities for the power sector in 12 distribution companies from 1985 to 2001 performance is evaluated contrasting changes in mean and median by wilcoxon rank sum and pearson tests on financial and other performance indicators technical efficiency is measured by means of data envelopment analysis dea the nature of the dataset allows the estimation of malmquist productivity index and its evolution in time results show a recovery after the reform in the main performance indicators of profitability partial input productivity and output plant efficiency and productivity increased after the reform mainly in the largest utilities used as benchmarks in the dea efficiency scores measures meanwhile the less efficient power distribution companies did not improved after the reform and were not able to undertake plant restructuring to catch up in plant efficiency with respect to the pareto efficient input allocations econometric results on dea efficiency scores suggest a positive effect of policy reform

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

from the econometrics of capital punishment to the capital punishment of econometrics on the use and abuse of sensitivity analysis the academic debate over the deterrent effect of capital punishment has intensified again with a major policy outcome at stake about two dozen empirical studies have recently emerged that explore the issue donohue and wolfers 2005 claim to have examined the recent studies and shown the evidence not to be robust to specification changes we argue that the narrow scope of their study does not warrant this claim moreover focusing on our two studies that they have examined we show the deterrence findings to be robust while their work has serious flaws and their reporting appears to be selective the selectivity is biased towards showing no deterrence

stationarity of health expenditures and gdp evidence from panel unit root tests with heterogeneous structural breaks this paper re examines the stationarity of national health care expenditures and gdp in a panel setting utilizing data from 20 oecd countries over the period from 1960 to 1997 previous research in this area has recognized the drawback of not allowing for structural breaks in their unit root tests and noted that their empirical results may not be robust we advance the literature by utilizing a recently developed panel lm unit root test that allows for heterogeneous level shifts in contrast to previous analyses that did not consider breaks our results reject the unit root null hypothesis for both series