Technical efficiency and productivity changes in Spanish airports: A parametric distance functions approach

摘要

Nowadays, most of the effort is being put towards applying non-parametricrntechniques such as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in airport performancernstudies. This work explores another methodology that could either confirm orrndisagree with the empirical evidence attained by those studies. This methodologyrnis a parametric technique which estimates an efficient frontier by makingrnassumptions that enables to separate the random and efficiency factor. In arnparametric context, a functional form has to be chosen. We have selected arndistance function because of its advantages to deal with the multiple output naturernof airport activities in a parametric context. Parameters estimated through thernmulti-output input distance function let us calculate the evolution of the TotalrnFactor Productivity (TFP) and its decomposition in Spanish airports. Thernempirical evidence found in this study is similar to those in the literaturernreviewed. Hub airport showed a level of efficiency above the average and therernwas a significance difference in efficiency between main land airports and islandrnairports.In general terms, we found that, for our airport sample, the average rate ofrnproductivity showed a slight improvement of 0.9% per annum and the core enginernof this productivity increase was the technical progress (3% increase) rather thanrnefficiency improvement.