non parametric production analysis in non competitive environments we extend the non parametric methodology for empirical production analysis to deal with endogenous prices as price endogeneity is often complemented by price uncertainty we consider both the case of certain prices and the case of uncertain prices the extensions are fully compatible with existing tools for eliciting and representing technology and price information and preserves the tractable mathematical programming structure of the original methodology an empirical application to the dutch electricity distribution sector illustrates our extension

adjusting input output models for capacity utilization in service industries abstract the input output i o models assume the stability of economic ratios and regional multipliers over the evaluation period for manufacturing sectors constant multipliers within a short term period may present a reasonable picture of the real world production function tourism industry however is composed of a variety of services in which total output and factor inputs are strongly influenced by capacity utilization cu a conceptual model is proposed in this paper which purports that shifts in cu for perishable services will lead to economies of scale in inputs price changes in the final output capacity constraint on domestic supply and substitution between input factors especially between capital and labor these factors simultaneously modify i o ratios and multipliers traditional i o analysis which assumes constant economic ratios and multipliers will therefore lead to biases in tourism impact estimates especially to value added components as it does not reflect the changing costs of operation in response to shifting supply and demand

measuring technical efficiency abstract the theoretical consideration of technical efficiency has existed since koopmans koopmans t c 1951 an analysis of production as an efficient combination of activities in koopmans t c ed activity analysis of production and allocation cowles commission for research in economics monograph no 13 wiley new york defined it as production possibilities for which it is not possible to increase any output without simultaneously increasing any input ceteris paribus the non parametric approach to efficiency calculation known as data envelopment analysis is not based on this definition but rather on the radial index of farrell farrell m j 1957 the measurement of productive efficiency journal of the royal statistic society ser a 120 253 281 even after farrell efficiency is achieved there may exist additional slack in individual inputs and or outputs implying that farrell s index does not necessarily measure koopmans inefficiency various measures have been proposed to solve this problem this paper discusses shortcomings of these alternative measures and introduces a new relative measure of technical efficiency using simulated data it is shown that the new measure outperforms existing measures in the majority of cases

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

the value of multipliers and their policy implications abstract this paper examines the nature of tourism multipliers their origins and evolution their misuse their strengths weaknesses and limitations and finally their value for policymaking and planning

technical efficiency shadow price and substitutability of chinese industrial so2 emissions a parametric approach abstract in china s transition process towards sustainable development fighting against the rising so2 emission has become a great and urgent challenge based on a parametric quadratic directional distance function this paper investigates the inefficiency level shadow price and substitution elasticity of chinese industrial so2 emission from 1998 to 2011 the results show a u shape for the technical inefficiency indicating an efficiency improvement before 2005 but it getting worse since then which is that the east area displays a declining trend while the west goes up and the middle follows the national pattern at the east middle west region level as of the shadow price and morishima elasticity both the national and regional levels hold an increasing trajectory the shadow price is continuously increased a lot during the whole period implying to control additional so2 emission become more costly the positive morishima substitution elasticity suggests there may exist the win win opportunities for so2 regulation moreover the large regional disparity highlights the needs to adopt a differentiated regional policy

forward integration by a monopolist some extensions vertical integration by imperfectly competitive firms poses both positive and normative economic questions the positive questions concern the incentives of such firms to engage in forward or backward integration on the other hand the normative questions concern the impact of integration by such firms on social welfare if the incentives of imperfectly competitive firms lead to a welfare gain then there is no need for public intercession in the process say by antitrust authorities however if private incentives are at odds with social welfare then public policy attention may be needed these matters are considered in an extensive theoretical and empirical literature on vertical integration a review of the central issues in this literature is provided by machlup and taber 5 and warren boulton 12 here i shall focus on the recent work by schmalensee 8 and warren boulton 11 on forward integration by a monopolist the basic insight of their models is as follows suppose a monopolist is producing a product used as an input by a competitive downstream industry in variable proportions with another input monopoly pricing of the first input induces inefficient input utilization by the downstream industry in the production of the final good the monopoly input price exceeds its marginal costs of production the resulting efficiency loss represents an incentive for the monopolist to integrate forward by producing the final product in an integrated firm the monopolist transfer prices the otherwise monopolized input at marginal costs and thereby converts the efficiency loss into profit this point was originally made by burstein 3 but the recent work appears to have been motivated by the graphical formulation of vernon and graham 10 after developing the case of a fixed proportions technology we present the vernon and graham illustration

differential multipliers for the accomodation sector abstract this study examines differential income and employment multipliers according to types of industrial organization because of differences in production processes and purchasing patterns it is hypothesized that the size of the multipliers varies inversely with size scale degree of affiliation and degree of outside ownership differential multipliers for the accomodation sector were calculated by adapting the regional tourism models developed by archer to an 11 sector input output model of metropolitan victoria bc the findings support the hypotheses of the study since significant variations and correlations were found for the multipliers and other selected variables by organization types

are football managers as efficient as coaches performance analysis with ex ante and ex post inputs in the premier league there is a controversy on sport performance literature about what type of inputs might explain more deeply the performance of sports clubs inputs specification controversy by one side several p

controlling for the use of extreme weights in bank efficiency assessments during the financial crisis we propose a method for bank efficiency assessment based on weight restricted dea that limits banks abilities to use extreme weights corresponding to extreme judgements of the risk adjusted prices on funding sources and assets based on a data set comprising the largest european banks during the financial crisis we illustrate the impact of the proposed weight restrictions in two different efficiency models one related to banks funding mix and one related to their asset mix the results show that using a more balanced set of weights tend to reduce the estimated efficiency scores more for those banks which were bailed out during the crisis which confirms the potential bias within standard dea that does not control for extreme weights applied by highly risky banks we discuss the use of the proposed method as a regulatory tool to constrain discretion when complying with regulatory capital benchmarks such as the basel regulatory capital ratios

a bi objective weighted model for improving the discrimination power in mcdea lack of discrimination power and poor weight dispersion remain major issues in data envelopment analysis dea since the initial multiple criteria dea mcdea model developed in the late 1990s only goal programming approaches that is the gpdea ccr and gpdea bcc were introduced for solving the said problems in a multi objective framework we found gpdea models to be invalid and demonstrate that our proposed bi objective multiple criteria dea bio mcdea outperforms the gpdea models in the aspects of discrimination power and weight dispersion as well as requiring less computational codes an application of energy dependency among 25 european union member countries is further used to describe the efficacy of our approach

estimation of multipliers for the activity of hotels and restaurants abstract the purpose of this paper is to model and estimate the multipliers for hotels and restaurants the most characteristic of the industries that make up the tourism business this multiplier can be used for estimating the economic impact of tourism demand likewise a tool for planners and policy makers is provided the data source is the set of input output tables gathered by the oecd which in its last edition has collected a sufficiently representative number of countries with an equally suitable disaggregation level two models are elaborated for the estimation of the rasmussen backwards multiplier and of the imports multiplier respectively some explanatory variables previously used in the literature are confirmed while others are proposed as alternative ones

tourism in mauritius an economic impact study with marketing implications abstract tourism impact analysis is traditionally used to measure the volume of income employment public sector revenue and imports generated in a holiday area by tourist spending and to calculate the differential impacts made by visitors from various origins this article on mauritius shows how such analysis can provide useful marketing information to help maximize the economic impact of tourism in a small island economy

the measurement of tourist income multipliers abstract there have been many area studies measuring tourism income multipliers and these have been well covered in a number of review articles however the treatment of income is not always made explicit and the term is only loosely defined this article addresses the issue of personal taxation and social insurance contributions and shows that the stage at which they are deducted as leakages can have very different effects on the resulting multiplier values

getting implicit shadow prices right for the estimation of the malmquist index the case of agricultural total factor productivity in developing countries abstract the malmquist index has become extensively used in international comparisons of agricultural productivity since it does not require prices for its estimation which are normally not available however the dea approach used to estimate this index still uses implicit price information this entails potential problems because these methods are susceptible to the effect of data noise and shadow prices can prove to be inconsistent with prior knowledge on cost shares in this paper we analyze implicit input shadow shares used in the dea approach to estimate agricultural productivity using the malmquist index for 72 developing countries we then set bounds to the implicit input shares introducing information on their likely value and compare constrained and unconstrained input shares we conclude that the incidence of zero shadow prices justifies the introduction of constraints in the estimation of the malmquist index the paper also presents detailed results of tfp growth in developing countries using constrained shadow shares for their estimation we find that agricultural tfp has been growing steadily in the past 20 years even if countries like china brazil and india are not considered remarkably we find a clear improvement in the performance of sub saharan africa since the mid 1980s key words malmquist shadow prices total factor productivity jel codes d2

financial sustainability and poverty outreach within a network of village banks in cameroon a multi dea approach abstract microfinance institutions face a double bottom line they perform financial tasks by giving microcredits to their customers and support projects aiming at reducing poverty in doing so they have to be financially self sufficient and to target poor people excluded from the traditional financial systems however a trade off may exist between financial sustainability and poverty outreach for these institutions by using a multi dea approach this paper shows that even if a trade off exists for 15 of the mc 2 mutuelles communautaires de croissance in cameroon there is no trade off for 46 of them in order to increase without trade off financial and social performance of inefficient mc 2 a benchmarking approach combing dea and performance indicators has been developed dea is used for identifying best practices and setting benchmarking goals performance indicators are used for characterizing areas needing improvements and following the evolution of mc 2 toward their goals i e for implementing benchmarking complementarity of both approaches provides a tool box for improving financial and social efficiency and reducing the trade off between financial sustainability and poverty outreach of microfinance institutions

simulating weights restrictions in data envelopment analysis by means of unobserved dmus data envelopment analysis dea is a method for assessing the comparative efficiencies of decision making units e g banks and schools by relating their output to their input levels restrictions are often imposed in these assessments to reflect prior judgments on the values of input and or output variables this paper introduces a new approach to capturing and using value judgments in dea based on unobserved decision making units in so doing it opens up a whole new approach for reflecting value judgments in dea assessments which can offer advantages in certain situations

advanced x efficiencies for ccr and bcc models towards peer based dea controlling abstract classical ccr and bcc dea models follow a general concept they allow each dmu to evaluate its in efficiency in the most favorable way and then propose input reduction and or output raise so as to follow its best practice units a first step beyond this self appraisal is the consideration of x efficiencies thus evaluating dmus with optimal weights of a peer doing this for all possible peers yields a cross efficiency matrix either for ccr or for bcc models this matrix might help to find a fair peer for the remaining dmus in a second step recent contributions analyze for ccr models how such x evaluated dmus might improve their efficiency with respect to a peer s weight system in these models even free variation of inputs outputs is possible rather than reduction and or raise such models will be portrayed here and generalized for variable returns to scale the remaining discomfort which a dmu might feel with the choice for peer among business rivals leads to the concept of a virtual peer vp this paper proposes such a peer as a consensual option for all dmus now for either return to scale ccr and bcc for an input or output oriented focus and by free variation of inputs and outputs they can meet the requirements of vp the dmus pay a heavy price however the peer controls their respective weights and even their activities he is a dictator

productivity and efficiency change and shareholder value evidence from the spanish banking sector productivity change and shareholder value have been analysed in the banking sector in the last few years although it should be noted that these two important aspects have been studied separately in this regard the main contribution of our study is to link these two lines of research by verifying whether those banks characterized by higher levels of efficiency and productivity change have a higher shareholder value to measure changes in efficiency and productivity we use the malmquist nonparametric technique which is calculated from data envelopment analysis dea linear programming approach the malmquist total factor productivity index enables separation of the catching up effect i e changes over time in technical efficiency from technological change i e the shift of best practice frontier over time due to technological progress our results for a sample of listed spanish banks in the period 2000 to 2004 confirm that those banks with higher efficiency and productivity changes have a higher

the impact of environmental expenditures on performance in the u s chemical industry abstract this study analyzes chemical industry companies with environmental expenditures to determine which ones have better financial performance in addition this study uses data envelopment analysis to evaluate the efficiency of firms with and without environmental expenditures this study also utilizes the malmquist productivity index mpi to analyze firms productivity change and a bootstrap method to test whether the indexes are statistically significant finally this study divides chemical industry companies into three main categories based on their products the results of this study provide significant evidence of a relationship between environmental expenditures and financial performance the findings suggest that firms with environmental expenditures have better efficiency and productivity hence the study encourages companies in the industry to put more effort into protecting the environment that can be through practicing cleaner production to create higher benefits

the paradox of vertical integration antitrust policy and commentary include a persistent suspicion that vertical integration may increase market power in the integrated industries the facet of this suspicion that economists have analyzed most is conveyed as follows suppose that a pure monopoly sells an intermediate good to the firms in a final product industry and that the monopolist acquires all of those firms since the firms in the final product industry have been combined vertical integration has extended monopoly to a second industry the integration does not improve production technologies or product traits in either industry nor reduce transaction costs thus abstracting from any economies of integration this paper concerns the paradox that economic models usually show vertical integration increasing economic welfare in spite of the extension of monopoly and even in the absence of any economies since economies would also enhance welfare these models contradict the suspicion that vertical integration is harmful in a recent survey of these models blair and kaserman have commented that o n the basis of these results the economics profession generally argued that the appropriate antitrust policy regarding vertical integration was conciliation at best or neutrality at worst 2 2 the only contrary result is in models where inputs are substitutable in final production sometimes vertical integration reduces welfare however in order to focus sharply on the paradoxical welfare result this paper assumes fixed input proportions and ignores any economies of integration section i has a summary model that sets the stage for the succeeding analysis the principal discovery of this paper is that the paradox is not in general valid even for a simplified model this discovery appears when the assumption of pure input monopoly which is universal in the existing literature is relaxed in section ii the new model includes situations in which integration reduces welfare contrary to the usual result these contradictory situations have strong implications for antitrust policy because the analysis also shows that they ate the only kinds of situations that antitrust enforcers are likely to confront

improving envelopment in data envelopment analysis under variable returns to scale in a data envelopment analysis model some of the weights used to compute the efficiency of a unit can have zero or negligible value despite of the importance of the corresponding input or output this paper offers an approach to preventing inputs and outputs from being ignored in the dea assessment under the multiple input and output vrs environment building on an approach introduced in allen and thanassoulis 2004 for single input multiple output crs cases the proposed method is based on the idea of introducing unobserved dmus created by adjusting input and output levels of certain observed relatively efficient dmus in a manner which reflects a combination of technical information and the decision maker s value judgements in contrast to many alternative techniques used to constrain weights and or improve envelopment in dea this approach allows one to impose local information on production trade offs which are in line with the general vrs technology the suggested procedure is illustrated using real data 2011 elsevier b v all rights reserved

using data envelopment analysis for costing bank products an important problem that many banks face is to provide satisfactory cost estimates for the variety of products and services they offer accurate product cost estimates can be used to support better product mix and pricing decisions in this paper we present a method for providing efficient and reliable cost estimates of bank products at the branch level based on the non parametric benchmarking technique of data envelopment analysis dea results from an empirical study undertaken in a banking environment to demonstrate the applicability of the method are also presented

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

cost efficiency of french rugby clubs this article analyses the cost efficiency of french first league rugby clubs using a stochastic frontier model the frontier estimation confirmed that the model fits the data well with all coefficients correctly signed and in line with the theoretical requirements the results show that one of the clubs is operating efficiently with the majority of clubs clustered around 20 inefficiency policy implications are derived

strategic corporate social responsibility and economic performance this article proposes a novel corporate social responsibility csr index based on a data envelopment analysis dea model acknowledging the argument that companies might favour those csr dimensions that provide strategic competitive advantages we argue that the index can capture companies strategic approach to csr furthermore our findings reveal a neutral relationship between this strategic csr index and economic performance as measured by return on assets roa and tobin s q when controlling for firm unobserved heterogeneity and past economic performance by contrast an equally weighted index of the same csr indicators is found to be negatively related with roa which reinforces our claim that this specific dea based index is a measure of strategic csr

eco efficiency and convergence in oecd countries this paper assesses the convergence in eco efficiency of a group of 22 oecd countries over the period 1980 2008 in doing so three air pollutants representing the impact on the environment of economic activities are considered namely carbon dioxide text co 2 nitrogen oxides text no mathrm x and sulphur oxides text so mathrm x furthermore eco efficiency scores at both country and air pollutant specific level are computed using data envelopment analysis techniques then convergence is evaluated using the recent approach by phillips and sul econometrica 75 1771 1855 2007 which tests for the existence of convergence groups first we find that eco efficiency has improved over the period with the exception of text no mathrm x emissions second switzerland is the most eco efficient country followed by some scandinavian economies such as sweden iceland norway and denmark in contrast southern european countries such as portugal spain and greece in addition to hungary turkey canada and the united states are among the worst performers finally we find that both the most eco efficient countries and the worst tend to form clubs of convergence

measuring efficiency with a linear economic model this paper modifies and interprets data envelopment analysis dea using a linear economic model this approach is similar to the cone input output and assurance region approaches to dea but it is implemented so that the multipliers are measured in the same units across all linear optimization problems this approach allows one to interpret alternatives as profit maximizing organizations and the dea multipliers as prices that are comparable across the alternatives this is a useful extension of the assurance region concept but more important is that our approach enhances communication with decision makers the improved communication is illustrated by applying the model to the siting of a long term health care facility this application is interesting because the multiplier bounds make practical sense and because the problem has dimensions that sometimes lead to interpretation problems with the traditional dea model for example the site characteristics do not result from coordinated decisions some s

regulatory reforms and productivity an empirical analysis of the japanese electricity industry the japanese electricity industry has experienced regulatory reforms since the mid 1990s this article measures productivity in japan s steam power generation sector and examines the effect of reforms on the productivity of this industry over the period 1978 2003 we estimate the luenberger productivity indicator which is a generalization of the commonly used malmquist productivity index using a data envelopment analysis approach factors associated with productivity change are investigated through dynamic generalized method of moments gmm estimation of panel data our empirical analysis shows that the regulatory reforms have contributed to productivity growth in the steam power generation sector in japan

hypercongestion in production correspondences an empirical exploration this empirical contribution reviews the rather limited existing literature measuring congestion in production it first compares current ways to measure congestion using nonparametric specifications of technologies in particular it focuses on the magnitude and incidence of the congestion detected in empirical studies using traditional radial efficiency measures thereafter it shows the limitations of this radial measurement and how alternative measurement schemes may reveal higher amounts of congestion then the new more general methodology of measuring s congestion is presented in particular we first present a numerical example to illustrate the way the s disposable technologies allow to capture more extreme forms of congestion by setting empirically determined upper bounds to the wasting of inputs then an empirical illustration is presented based on an existing sample of data a final section concludes

contestable markets an uprising in the theory of industry structure presents a transcript of the presidential address delivered at the 94th meeting of the american economic association on december 29 1981 discussion of developments in the theory of industry structure welfare attributes of contestable markets behavior characteristics of oligopoly equilibrium intertemporal vulnerability to inefficient entry ebsco

cost efficiency of electric grid utilities in china a comparison of estimates from sfa mle sfa bayes and stoned cnls with the purpose of estimating the range of cost efficiency levels of the power grid sector in china we assembled a data set including 23 provincial power grid companies spanning from 2005 to 2009 and conducted an empirical study based on the sfa mle sfa bayes and stoned cnls methodologies empirical results show that the average values of efficiency from different models vary from 0 85 to 0 92 depending especially on the assumptions underlying inefficiency content further results demonstrate that there is exogenous technical progress during the sample period and per capita gdp of the province is negatively related to the costs of the electric grid company located in the corresponding province we hope this empirical study will contribute to the debate on an efficiency based regulation scheme which was introduced to the chinese electric grid sector on a pilot base in 2014

a dynamic multi stage data envelopment analysis model with application to energy consumption in the cotton industry abstract data envelopment analysis dea is a non parametric method for evaluating the relative efficiency of homogenous decision making units dmus with multiple inputs and outputs in this paper we present a dynamic multi stage dea dms dea approach to evaluate the efficiency of cotton production energy consumption in the proposed model the farms which consume resources i e fertilizers seeds and pesticides to produce cotton are assumed to be the dmus inputs not consumed during a planning period are carried over to the next period in the planning horizon initially a dms dea model is used to determine the overall efficiency of the dmus with dynamic inputs next the efficiency score of each dmu is calculated for each time period in the planning horizon we demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method and exhibit the efficacy of the procedures and algorithms with a real life case study of energy consumption in the cotton industry

a study of optimal weights restriction in data envelopment analysis data envelopment analysis dea is a mathematical programming approach to assessing relative efficiencies within a group of decision making units dmus an important outcome of such an analysis is a set of virtual multipliers or weights accorded to each input or output factor taken into account due to the factor weight flexibility of the dea model a dmu may assign very low factor weight scores to some of its unfavourable inputs or outputs and appear as efficient thus producing nonsensical results in some cases this study focuses on this shortcoming to integrate an optimal weights restriction model and absolute restriction method to restricting weight flexibility in dea so that the evaluation result can be more realistic and finally takes the garbage clearance of each district in kaohsiung city in taiwan as an example for the illustration

restricting weights in value efficiency analysis in this paper we consider the problem of incorporating additional preference information into value efficiency analysis by using the price information of inputs and outputs this is done to improve the accuracy of the estimation of the value efficiency scores value efficiency developed by halme et al 1999 is an efficiency concept which takes into account the decision maker s preferences value efficiency analysis is based on the assumption that an implicitly known value function reaches its maximum at the most preferred solution on the efficient frontier the most preferred solution is an input output vector preferred to all other possible input output vectors the ultimate goal is to measure a need to improve radially the values of inputs and or outputs to make them equally preferred to the most preferred solution because we do not know the value function we approximate the indifference curves of all possible value functions satisfying certain assumptions by their tangents at the most preferred solution the resulting cone of the tangents consists of points less or equally preferred to the most preferred solution however in addition to the most preferred solution information about the prices of inputs and outputs may be available as well we show how this information can be incorporated into the analysis and illustrate the approach by an example on the performance of municipal dental units in finland

improving envelopment in data envelopment analysis data envelopment analysis defines the relative efficiency of a decision making unit dmu as the ratio of the sum of its weighted outputs to the sum of its weighted inputs allowing the dmus to freely allocate weights to their inputs outputs however this measure may not reflect a dmu s true efficiency as some inputs outputs may not contribute reasonably to the efficiency measure traditionally to overcome this problem weights restrictions have been imposed this paper offers a new approach to this problem where dmus operate a constant returns to scale technology in a single input multi output context the approach is based on introducing unobserved dmus created by adjusting the output levels of certain observed relatively efficient dmus reflecting a combination of technical information of feasible production levels and the dm s value judgments its main advantage is that the information conveyed by the dm is local with reference to a specific observed dmu the approach is illustrated on a real life application 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

explanatory meta analysis for the comparison and transfer of regional tourist income multipliers baaijens s r nijkamp p and van montfort k 1998 explanatory meta analysis for the comparison and transfer of regional tourist income multipliers reg studies 32 839 849 this paper aims to demonstrate the potential of quantitative research synthesis in particular meta analysis as a methodology for comparative research with a particular view on tourist impact analysis the attention is focused on regional tourist multipliers which measure the effects of tourist expenditure on the economy of a given area on the basis of a varied sample of studies on tourist multipliers differences among tourist income multipliers are ex post examined the preliminaries of this investigation are discussed in order to elucidate some important issues meta analysis may be confronted with in addition the results of the comparative analysis of previous studies are transferred to the greek island of lesvos this area was estimated to have an average tourist income multiplier falling in between 0 55 and 0 67 baaije

performance assessment of alternative energy resources in brazilian power sector using data envelopment analysis abstract the brazilian power sector is known for the strong participation of renewable sources this characteristic is maintained thanks to government incentives for alternative sources with particular emphasis on wind generation small hydroelectric and sugar cane bagasse fired power plants because these are more costly than conventional plants they are nevertheless less costly than other alternative sources such as residue based generation the government s policy is based however on a purely economic analysis if socio environmental variables were to be taken into account the government s orientation in favor of renewable sources might be different the present article uses the data envelopment analysis dea method to incorporate such variables in the government s energy policies the results demonstrate the advantage of promoting residue based generation above that from other sources

using dea to evaluate 29 canadian textile companies considering returns to scale in this research we use data envelopment analysis dea to evaluate the performance of 29 canadian textile companies in 1994 using the charnes cooper and rodes ccr model in dea we first obtain the results of efficiency scores and returns to scale of 29 canadian textile companies we then focus on the returns to scale to examine the possibility of utilizing the inefficient inputs by either further expansion or vertical integration we develop a mathematical model to consider the trade off between reducing and not reducing the input surplus we use the cone ratio model to find the optimal level of vertical utilization the computational results are based on real data from the canadian textile companies

assessing eco efficiency through the dea analysis and decoupling index in the latin america countries abstract this study was developed according to a two step approach in the first step we provide an investigation of the changes in eco efficiency under constant and variable return to scale while on a second step the evaluation of the decoupling elasticity will be given the impacts of energy economic and environmental determinants inputs on the performance indicators of eco efficiency were calculated as the inverse of the carbon intensity ratio of the gdp over the co2 emissions both from the world development indicators database the changes in eco efficiency and the decoupling elasticity between co2 emissions and economic growth changes data was used for 16 latin america countries according to five year periods from 1994 to 2013 for all the five time span considered it is worth noting that the degree of technical efficiency for the latin america countries is lower than the degree of technological efficiency thus indicating that a portion of the overall inefficiency is due to the fact that these countries are producing below the production frontier rather than to an inefficient use of technology on average the results have confirmed that the technological scale change in energy production is the dominant factor influencing the optimal production frontier in the sample of countries under analysis complementarily according to the mixed results from the decoupling analysis we may conclude that the increase decrease of the co2 per capita emissions was due to other economic and environmental factors rather than to a negative positive effect of the gdp growth rate

the measurement of productive efficiency a reconsideration the purpose of this paper is to generalize the farrell indexes of productive efficiency to nonhomothetic production technologies and at the same time maintain the cost interpretation of the farrell measures since the generalized indexes rely heavily on recent developments in the estimation of frontier cost and production functions several frontier models are reviewed in addition to generalized indexes of technical allocative and overall productive efficiency a variety of single factor efficiency measures are discussed the applicability of the proposed efficiency measures is illustrated with a numerical example of electric power generation

exploring the existence of kuznets curve in countries environmental efficiency using dea window analysis abstract this paper using data envelopment dea window analysis and generalized method of moments gmm estimators examines the existence of a kuznets type relationship between countries environmental efficiency and national income specifically it measures the environmental efficiency of 17 oecd countries by constructing environmental efficiency ratios for the time period 1980 2002 the analysis with the application of dynamic panel data reveals that there isn t a kuznets type relationship between environmental efficiency and income allowing for dynamic effects we find that the adjustment to the target ratio is instantaneous we also find that increased economic activity does not always ensure environmental protection and thus the path of growth is important in addition to the growth itself

an intertemporal approach to measuring environmental performance with directional distance functions greenhouse gas emissions in the european union abstract the impact of economic activity on the environment is a matter of growing concern for firm managers policymakers researchers and society as a whole building on previous work by kortelainen 2008 dynamic environmental performance analysis a malmquist index approach ecological economics 64 701 715 we contribute an approach to assessing intertemporal environmental performance at the level of the management of specific pollutants as the result of change in eco efficiency and environmental technical change which identify catching up with best available environmental practices and eco innovation respectively in doing so we use data envelopment analysis techniques directional distance functions and luenberger productivity indicators our approach is employed to assess environmental performance in the emission of greenhouse gases in the european union 28 over the period 1990 2011 the main result is that environmental performance has been boosted by environmental technical change rather than by increases in eco efficiency although with certain differences among air pollutants accordingly policy measures aimed at enhancing eco efficiency are recommended to improve environmental performance in european countries regarding greenhouse gas emissions

strategic planning of optimal resource allocation in response to global financial crisis a study of international tourist hotels this study is principally designed to examine the changes in the efficiency effective resource allocation and future operation strategies of taiwan s international tourist hotel in global economic downturn at first we set up critical input and output factors and construct an assessment model using data envelopment analysis dea for analysis of relative efficiency further we apply an allocative efficiency model for additional considerations of each input cost and analyse proper and effective resource allocation finally there are significant changes in overall efficiency of international tourist hotels under global financial crisis we can also reach an effective allocation of the overall resources in such cases lowering cost has become a key issue for sustainable operation of international tourist hotel finally the greatest contribution of this study is to further classify the competitiveness and optimal cost allocation of taiwan s international tourist hotels into seven categories based on the

measuring technical efficiency and productivity growth a comparison of sfa and dea on norwegian grain production data this article compares data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis to assess efficiency and productivity growth of norwegian grain producers previous studies have dealt with either one of them and less of both for the assessment of productivity growth or regress malmquist productivity indices are derived from both approaches the data cover a 10 year period we find consistency between the approaches to the extent that 1 there are potentials for efficiency improvements but the magnitudes depends on the model applied and by segmentation of the data set 2 there has been a productivity improvement in the sector on average in the interval 30 38 in the period studied and 3 technical change has had the greatest impact on productivity indicating that producers have a tendency to catch up with the front runners in general policy makers are warned not to be indifferent with respect to the approach used for efficiency and productivity measurement as these may give different results

factor substitutability monopoly and vertical integration a heuristic analysis a monopolist of an intermediate good can extract profit from final consumers only indirectly since it only sells to other firms which in turn produce final products if those final producers substitute other inputs for the one the monopolist sells they would not see that their substitution cuts into the monopolist s profit because of this vertical externality 10 179 the monopolist would earn less than the maximum monopoly rent although the final producers would minimize their nominal costs their input combination would be suboptimal vernon and graham 11 showed that the monopolist would increase both its profit and economic welfare by vertically integrating to reverse such input substitution for a given final output schmalensee 9 then investigated what portion of a perfectly competitive final product industry the input monopolist would acquire while he found that complete integration would maximize profits schmalensee also discovered that the integration would affect final output and its price but that the effect was ambiguous obviously the welfare gain from lower real costs would be offset partially or entirely if integration also reduced output this ambiguity differed from analyses that had assumed a fixed input proportion in final production with fixed proportions integration never would reduce output and always would increase welfare the many refinements of schmalensee s analysis have shown that whether integration by the monopolist would increase or decrease final production depends on the elasticities of final demand and input substitution 3 6 7 12 13 the ambiguous effect on output that occurs when inputs are substitutable has become part of the lore about vertical integration and has been an element in the debates about antitrust policy toward vertical integration 2 168 this literature is very technical and does not have any single clear result comparable to that in the fixed proportions case for that reason it is difficult to convey intuitively this paper takes a heuristic approach that adds to this literature in several ways first the two components in the anatomy of integration are derived explicitly for the first time the first is a change in input proportions so as to reduce real costs the second is a broadening of monopoly 8 27 each of these components can affect final output revealing the anatomy shows that the component due to the change in the input proportions in final production not only reduces real cost it always con