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This paper analyzes efficiency and productivity changes in Emergency Obstetric and Newborn care (EmONC) in regional public hospitals in India. A novel approach of Weighted Russell Directional Distance Function Model (WRDDFM) has been employed. This model considers all the radial and non-radial slacks associated with good outputs as well as the undesirable outcomes while estimating inefficiency and helps to identify the source of the inefficiency. The empirical results based on a sample of 46 regional public hospitals from 2006–07 to 2013–14 show on average overall inefficiency of 24% and much of these are due to inefficiencies associated with undesirable outcome of stillbirths and intra-uterine deaths. Further, on an average the sampled hospitals have experienced marginal productivity decline over the reform period. The study indicates that there is a greater scope for efficiency and productivity gains in public hospitals, particularly if the undesirable outcome of still birth is minimized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to provide a more comprehensive efficiency measure to estimate the performance of OECD and non-OECD countries. A Russell directional distance function that appropriately credits the decision-making unit not only for increase in desirable outputs but also for the decrease of undesirable outputs is derived from the proposed weighted Russell directional distance model. The method was applied to a panel of 116 countries from 1992 to 2010. This framework also decomposes the comprehensive efficiency measure into individual input/output components' inefficiency scores that are useful for policy making. The results reveal that the OECD countries perform better than the non-OECD countries in overall, goods, labor and capital efficiencies, but worse in bad and energy efficiencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes the use of multi-activity network data envelopment analysis to appraise how incineration plants in Taiwan perform. Sample data from 2006 is used to examine the trade-offs between efficiency enhancement and pollution abatement. The respective efficiencies of the waste treatment and electricity generation are also assessed in a unified framework. The empirical results indicate that it is more important to improve the efficiency of waste treatment activity than of electricity generation activity in order to enhance the overall performance of Taiwan’s incinerators. Since ownership, location and length of operations do not in general affect their performance, any improvement has to come from the careful monitoring of each process of the waste treatment operations. Furthermore, given that the policy in Taiwan has moved away from incineration to recycling, the problem of an over-supply of incinerators may become apparent in the near future. Our results indicate that the availability of capacity size may be an important factor when policy-makers consider whether to close down some existing incinerators. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper aims to propose a unified framework of data envelopment analysis (DEA) model so as to facilitate legitimate comparisons of performance among the production and service processes as well as overall operations. The fractional measure network DEA (FNDEA) model is constructed by analytically stratifying the structure of an operational network according to the transport service characteristics of air routes. We compare the proposed model with separate multi-stage DEA evaluation results by using an actual data set from the domestic air routes of an airline in Taiwan. The results show that the FNDEA model is significantly different from the separate multi-stage DEA model in magnitude of performance scores. Managerial strategies for the improvement of performance for the airline are also suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper assesses whether geographical characteristics and service strategies influence the performance of Chinese airports. It examines the technical efficiency of 41 Chinese airports in 2008; with data envelopment analysis then regressed on environmental factors. The results show that airports located in cities with populations of more than two million are more efficient than those for other city sizes. Further, airports that are able to accommodate A380 or Boeing 747 aircraft are operationally more efficient than other categories, and airports' efficiency improves with the number of airlines using them. The distance between an airport and the local central business district, however, does not significantly affect its performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]