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In der Studie werden Effizienzpotenziale im Kinderbetreuungswesen betrachtet. Im Vordergrund stehen Potenziale der Steigerung und Verbesserung von Leistungen im bestehenden Finanzierungsrahmen, etwa die Zahl der betreuten Kinder oder die Verlängerung von Öffnungszeiten. Von qualitativ hochwertiger, zeitlich und örtlich umfassender und erschwinglicher Kinderbetreuung gehen positive Effekte aus. Hier sind Effekte auf Arbeitsmarktbeteiligung und Erwerbseinkommen von Eltern und Müttern relevant. Es ergeben sich Wirkungen auf den Bildungserfolg, auf die gesellschaftliche Integration und die soziale Mobilität der Kinder. In Österreich wurden in den letzten Jahren Anstrengungen zum Ausbau der Elementarpädagogik gesetzt. Dennoch ergeben sich Aufholpotenziale. Dies gilt insbesondere im Hinblick auf zeitliche Betreuungsumfänge sowie auf die Betreuung von Kindern unter drei Jahren. Positive Effekte und Aufholpotenziale veranlassen die Politik zur weiteren Ausweitung der Kinderbetreuung. Im Juli dieses Jahres wurde eine neue 15a-Vereinbarung beschlossen. Von der darin vorgesehenen finanziellen Ausstattung ist ohne Ausweitung der Budgets aus allgemeinen Haushalten keine substanzielle Ausweitung der Mittel zu erwarten. Dabei zeigen frühere Ergebnisse von EcoAustria, dass eine Ausweitung etwa der Öffnungszeiten oder Betreuungsquoten im bestehenden Versorgungsmodell mit Mehrausgaben verbunden sein kann. Auch sind schon in den letzten Jahren die Ausgaben deutlich gestiegen. Wenn die institutionelle Kinderbetreuung quantitativ und qualitativ an internationale Vorbilder herangeführt und positive Wirkungen entfalten soll, so müssen entweder zusätzliche Mittel bereitgestellt oder bestehende Effizienzpotenziale als Finanzierungspotenziale genutzt werden. In der Studie werden Effizienzpotenziale in der Kinderbetreuung analysiert. Grundlage sind Modelle der Data-Envelopment-Analyse. In einem outputorientierten DEA-Modell wird ermittelt, welche Outputgrößen technisch gesehen realisierbar wären, wenn alle Gemeinden bei konstanten Ausgaben so effizient wären wie ihre jeweils effizientesten Referenzgemeinden. Dabei zeigen sich Effizienzunterschiede zwischen Gemeinden. Die Modellergebnisse indizieren technische Effizienzpotenziale im Umfang von etwa 46.700 zusätzlich betreuten Kindern oder von zusätzlichen etwa 9.940 Öffnungsstunden über alle in die Analyse einbezogenen Gemeinden. Relativ zum gesamten in der Kindertagesheimstatistik erfassten Versorgungssystem ergibt sich ein technisches Effizienzpotenzial von 12 bis 13 Prozent. Auch wenn die technischen Ergebnisse die effektiv realisierbaren Effizienzpotenziale häufig überschätzen werden, so zeigt sich im Rahmen der Studie, dass auch im bestehenden Finanzierungsrahmen Potenziale der quantitativen und qualitativen Verbesserung bestehen. Dabei deuten die Ergebnisse insbesondere auf allokative Effizienzpotenziale hin. Diese können sich aus gemeinde- und trägerübergreifenden Kooperationen ergeben, wenn kleinere Einrichtungen mit weniger Kindern und Personal oder kürzeren Öffnungszeiten zu größeren Einheiten gebündelt werden. In vielen der kleineren Gemeinden ist abzuwägen zwischen örtlicher Versorgung im kleinstrukturierten Rahmen mit häufig kürzeren Öffnungszeiten und der Kooperation mit anderen Gemeinden zu größeren Einheiten. Dabei besteht die Aussicht, die Qualität der Betreuung - etwa in Form längerer Öffnungszeiten, kleinerer Gruppen, besserer Infrastruktur, pädagogischer Konzepte oder höherqualifizierten Betreuungspersonals - in kostengünstiger Weise zu verbessern. Um Effizienz- und Synergiepotenziale aus Kooperationen und Partnerschaften zu generieren, müssen Anreizstrukturen auf Gemeindeebene beachtet werden. In den gegebenen Leistungs- und Finanzierungsstrukturen sind nur wenige Anreize für solche Kooperationen implementiert. Es fehlt häufig an einer überregionalen Bedarfsbestimmung sowie der Angebotsplanung. Die Folge sind Verluste allokativer Effizienz.

Auch 30 Jahre nach der Deutschen Vereinigung erreicht die ostdeutsche Wirtschaft nur 82% der westdeutschen Arbeitsproduktivität. Dieser Unterschied in der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Arbeitsproduktivität steht in engem Zusammenhang mit vielen wirtschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Problemen, denen Ostdeutschland heute gegenübersteht. Auf Basis differenzierter Daten zu den einzelnen Produkten, die Firmen im deutschen Verarbeitenden Gewerbe herstellen, untersuchen wir in diesem Beitrag, wie sich ost- und westdeutsche Firmen bezüglich Produktspezialisierung, Produktpreisen und technischer Effizienz unterscheiden. Wir zeigen auf, dass der Osten - entgegen der Hypothese der "verlängerten Werkbank" - nicht aufgrund einer Spezialisierung auf Vorprodukte weniger produktiv als der Westen ist. Obwohl Ostprodukte zu deutlich geringeren Preisen verkauft werden, können auch Preisunterschiede zwischen Ost- und Westfirmen den Produktivitätsrückstand nicht erklären. Stattdessen sind Faktoren, welche die physische Produktivität (technische Effizienz) von Unternehmen beeinflussen, entscheidend, um den Produktivitätsrückstand auf Unternehmensebene zu erklären.

In der Literatur zur Effizienz von Hochschulen werden entweder die eingeworbenen Drittmittel oder die Anzahl der Publikationen als Indikator für institutionelle Forschungsleistungen verwendet. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht, ob beide Indikatoren zu einer ähnlichen oder unterschiedlichen Einschätzung der Effizienz von Universitäten führen. Die Ergebnisse weisen darauf hin, dass die auf Drittmitteln und Publikationsmaßen basierenden Effizienzwerte hoch korrelieren, so dass die Forschungsindikatoren bei der Bewertung von Universitäten als gleichwertig angesehen werden können.

Die Effizienz der Hochschulen in den Flächenländern Ost und West liegt im Durchschnitt auf annähernd gleichem Niveau. Innerhalb der ostdeutschen Flächenländer sind auf Länderebene zwischen den Universitäten jedoch erhebliche Effizienzunterschiede festzustellen. Zu diesen Ergebnissen kommt das IFO INSTITUT, Niederlassung Dresden, in einer Effizienzanalyse für deutsche Universitäten und Fachhochschulen. Zur Bestimmung der Effizienz werden zwei Ansätze, die Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) sowie die Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA), herangezogen. Der Beitrag gibt einen Einblick in die Methode und Anwendung der Effizienzanalyse und zeigt im Anschluss die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung für beide betrachteten Hochschultypen (Universitäten und Fachhochschulen) auf.

Eine möglichst energieeffiziente und damit auch kostengünstige Produktion - welches Unternehmen wünscht sich dies nicht? In nahezu allen Bereichen des Verarbeitenden Gewerbes wird eine effiziente Energienutzung immer wichtiger und in vielen Fällen sogar zum entscheidenden Wettbewerbsvorteil gegenüber konkurrierenden Unternehmen - gerade in Zeiten steigender Energiepreise. Doch eine energieeffiziente Fertigung entsteht nicht von heute auf morgen und bedarf neben dem Einsatz technischer Effizienzlösungen auch strategischer Managementwerkzeuge und geeigneter Qualifikationsmaßnahmen für die betroffenen Beschäftigten. Die folgenden Auswertungen mit Daten aus der Erhebung Modernisierung der Produktion 2015 können Unternehmen neue Wege aufzeigen, wie insbesondere der Einsatz von Energiemanagementsystemen und das Angebot von formellen oder informellen Qualifikationsmöglichkeiten eine effiziente Energienutzung im Betriebsalltag unterstützen und somit entscheidende Wettbewerbsvorteile ermöglichen.

Agriculture plays an important role for Kazakhstan not only because of rural employment, but also because of the diversity it brings to its oil dependent economy. A considerable increase in grain exports was achieved during the recent years, however, there still is a large room for increasing productivity and efficiency to boost the agricultural potential of the country further. The government of Kazakhstan has introduced several policy packages in the past to boost productivity and efficiency, however, the impact of these reforms has not been yet analyzed quantitatively. Micro level data collected from 200 farms in northern Kazakhstan in 2015 is used in the analysis, in order to fill this research gap. A mixture of evidences is found in terms of policy effect on productivity and efficiency. The results of the analysis showed that direct subsidy access reduced the efficiency, while access to supply chain infrastructure had the opposite effect and increased the efficiency. Therefore, the study concludes that the government should divert its policy support from direct subsidy payments to the improvement of agricultural infrastructure. This will influence positively not only productivity and efficiency, but also Kazakhstan's commitments towards international and regional trade agreements. In Kasachstan spielt die Landwirtschaft nicht nur als Arbeitgeber im ländlichen Raum eine wichtige Rolle, sondern diese trägt auch zur Diversifizierung der stark von Ölexporten abhängigen Ökonomie bei. Gerade die Getreideexporte haben in den letzten Jahren einen starken Anstieg verzeichnet. Jedoch gibt es noch Möglichkeiten das landwirtschaftliche Potenzial des Landes weiter auszuschöpfen. Die Regierung Kasachstans hat in den letzten Jahren mit einem ganzen Bündel an politischen Maßnahmen versucht, landwirtschaftliche Produktivität und Effizienz zu steigern. Die Wirksamkeit dieser Maßnahmen ist bisher noch nicht quantitativ analysiert worden. Um diese Forschungslücke zu schließen, wurden 200 landwirtschaftliche Betriebe in Nordkasachstan im Jahr 2015 befragt. Die quantitative Analyse der Daten zeigt, dass sich der direkte Zugang zu Subventionen negativ auf die Effizienz auswirkt, wohingegen der Zugang zu Lieferketteninfrastruktur sich effizienzsteigernd auswirkt. Daraus läßt sich als Politikempfehlung ableiten, dass die Regierung sich weniger auf direkte Subventionszahlungen, als vielmehr auf die Verbesserung der landwirtschaftlichen Infrastruktur konzentrieren sollte. Dies wird sich positiv nicht nur auf Produktivität und Effizienz, sondern auch auf die Verpflichtungen des Landes gegenüber internationalen und regionalen Handelsabkommen auswirken.

This paper seeks to assess the well productivity changes in US shale since the collapse of oil prices in 2014 by analysing the nature of these productivity gains through an assessment of the impact of cost cuts, efficiency gains, and technology advances on the performance of recently developed shale and tight oil wells. The paper argues that the shale oil sector is becoming far more resilient and nimble than many had expected and productivity continues to grow even in a low price environment. Looking ahead, there is a lot of running room left in the unconventional oil plays. The paper argues that high grading to core areas is an important factor, but it does not explain the entirety of productivity gains. While there has been no single transformative technological development with regards to shale oil development over the past several years, there are signs that shale oil is moving from a manufacturing process, in which producers simply repeat what worked on the previous well, to a more thoughtful well researched program, particularly in the areas of completion designs, well spacing, better rock analysis and proper lateral placement, which have all been contributing to well productivity gains.

Over the past few years, the price of electricity on the European market has decreased significantly and thereby the competitiveness and profitability of the Swiss hydropower firms has deteriorated. With one possibility to improve the sector’s competitiveness being an increase in the firms’ level of cost efficiency, the goal of this study is to quantify the firms’ level of persistent and transient cost efficiency using the generalized true random effects (GTRE) model introduced by Colombi et al. (2014) and Filippini and Greene (2015). Applying this newly developed GTRE model to a total cost function, the level of cost efficiency of 65 Swiss hydropower firms is analyzed for the period between 2000 and 2013. For comparison, a true random effects (TRE) specification is estimated alongside, serving as a benchmark for the transient level of cost efficiency. The results of the GTRE model show the presence of persistent as well as transient cost inefficiency. The existing level of persistent inefficiency could hinder the hydropower firms from reacting flexibly to new market environments.

Farmers in most OECD countries are engaged in different activities which go beyond agriculture. When assessing farm performance, it is appropriate to model these heterogeneous farm outputs separately. In this study, we use the distance function approach, which allows the consideration of technology with multiple outputs and multiple inputs. We compare estimates from single-output technology with estimates from multiple-output technology. Our empirical analysis is based on an unbalanced panel of dairy farms in the plain region of Switzerland for the period from 2003 to 2009. We choose the parametric estimation method and employ a translog specification of the production technology. The test of output separability favours a model that separately considers three different outputs: agricultural output; para-agricultural output; and direct payments. The separate modelling of direct payments has considerable influence on the estimated technology parameters as well as the technical efficiency scores. The consideration of direct payments as a separate output increases the elasticity of land by a factor greater than two and, accordingly, reduces the distance function elasticities of other inputs. The average technical efficiency estimates do not differ substantially when specifications differ. However, we reveal serious differences in the estimates of technical efficiency for individual farms. The estimated rank correlation coefficients show that the ranking of farms in terms of technical efficiency differs considerably when direct payments are modelled as a separate output. Landwirtschaftliche Betriebe der meisten OECDLänder sind in Aktivitäten involviert, welche über die reine landwirtschaftliche Produktion hinausgehen. Bei der Leistungseinschätzung der Betriebe ist es angebracht, diese heterogenen Outputs separat zu modellieren. In dieser Studie nutzen wir einen Distanzfunktion- Ansatz, welcher die Berücksichtigung von Technologie mit mehreren Outputs und mehreren Inputs ermöglicht. Wir vergleichen die Schätzungen von der Technologie mit einem Output mit den Schätzungen von der Technologie mit mehreren Outputs. Unsere empirische Analyse basiert auf einem unbalansierten Panel-Datensatz, welcher Schweizer Milchbetriebe der Talregion von 2003 bis 2009 umfasst. Wir wählen eine parametrische Schätzungsmethode und verwenden eine Translogfunktion für die Spezifizierung der Produktionstechnologie. Der Test für die Separierbarkeit der Outputs bevorzugt das Modell mit separater Betrachtung drei verschiedener Outputs : landwirtschaftlicher Output, para-landwirtschaftlicher Output und Direktzahlungen. Die separate Modellierung der Direktzahlungen hat einen erheblichen Einfluss auf die geschätzten technologischen Parameter sowie auf die technischen Effizienzwerte. Die Berücksichtigung der Direktzahlungen als separater Output erhöht die Elastizität des Inputs „Land“ um mehr als das Zweifache, während die Produktivität der anderen Inputs verringert wird. Die Schätzungen der durchschnittlichen technischen Effizienz unterscheiden sich nur geringfügig zwischen den Spezifikationen. Jedoch zeigen sich beträchtliche Unterschiede in den Schätzungen der technischen Effizienz einzelner Betriebe. Die Schätzungen der Rangkorrelationskoeffizienten zeigen, dass die separate Berücksichtigung der Direktzahlungen zu grossen Unterschieden in der technischen Effizienz der Betriebe führt.

There has been a significant increase in agricultural output in the past 50 years. A major factor of this growth is the rise in input use such as fertilizer, especially during the beginning of this period. However, the trend is not uniform throughout the world. Even though there are still regions where fertilizer can contribute greatly to the increase in yield, this input is so overused in some other places that its marginal productivity is no longer significant. In this case, not only is it a waste of valuable resources, it also leads to environmental degradation and pollution that is detrimental to human health. To make matters worse, the quality of the agricultural input itself has been of increasing concern lately. It includes problems such as normal seed being sold as hybrid seed, pesticide that is mixed with less effective chemicals, or fertilizer which contains less nutrient than that labeled on the package. We focus our research on the North China Plain, a region with both fertilizer overuse and fertilizer quality problems. The issue of low fertilizer quality is however not confined to this region only, as recent news reports have indicated that substandard or fake agricultural input is a problem in other countries as well, for example Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Vietnam. In addition, although the analysis presented in this dissertation concentrates on fertilizer, some of the methodology can also be extended to examine the impact of other agricultural inputs with questionable quality, such as seed and pesticide. The main theme of our study is split into three subtopics: efficiency, wealth effect, and use intensity, with each of them focusing on a different aspect of the impact from low quality fertilizer. The main contribution of this dissertation is that despite the widespread problem of fertilizer quality, we believe we are the first to examine its impact both theoretically and empirically on efficiency and use intensity. The theoretical contribution includes deriving the bias that exists if one were to ignore the quality aspect in the estimation of production functions and technical efficiency, especially if the research area is located at one of the places with fertilizer quality problems, such as China and the other affected countries. We also provide a theoretical framework that reconciles the different findings in the literature on the direction of wealth effect on fertilizer use. It offers a consistent explanation on why the wealth effect can be different when we are looking at regions or farmers of different wealth levels. Empirically, the dissertation quantifies the magnitude of estimation bias in input elasticity and technical efficiency in our research region of North China Plain. It also supports our theoretical derivation and shows that the direction of wealth effect is not fixed across farmers of different wealth levels. Finally, the integration of fertilizer testing into a household survey allows us to look closer at the link between perceived and true fertilizer quality, as well as how they affect the fertilizer use intensity of the farmers. The worsening fertilizer quality issue in the North China Plain is of great concern because - as this dissertation research shows - it leads to an increase in fertilizer use, which is already excessive in the area. This is not only a waste of valuable resources reducing economic efficiency but also causes environmental and health problems, e.g. through pollution of ground water. The currently implemented policy of subsidizing the fertilizer manufacturers is a double whammy in this regard because by keeping the price of the product low, it encourages the usage of an input that is already overused. It also makes the quality control of the fertilizer in the market more difficult, with the presence of so many small scale producers that are inefficient. In view of these deficiencies, it would be better to shift the policy focus from price reduction to quality improvement. A suggestion is to facilitate the award of quality labels to satisfactory products with regular third-party testing of the fertilizer to ensure that its quality does not deteriorate after receiving the label. The honest producers in the industry could also help set up a sector-wide monitoring body to prevent their image from being tarnished by the less responsible manufacturers. An additional recommendation is to increase the resources and staff available to extension service in order to increase the information flow between policymakers and farmers. In den letzten 50 Jahren ist die landwirtschaftliche Produktion deutlich gestiegen. Besonders zu Beginn diese Zeitraums war die zunehmende Nutzung von Produktionsmitteln wie Düngemittel ein bedeutender Treiber dieses Wachstums. Global verlief dieser Trend jedoch nicht einheitlich. Während es noch Regionen gibt, in denen Düngemittel maßgeblich zu einem Ertragsanstieg beitragen können, ist dieses Produktionsmittel in anderen Regionen so überbeansprucht, dass dessen Grenzproduktivität nicht länger bedeutend ist. In diesem Fall ist dies nicht nur eine Ressourcenverschwendung, sondern führt auch zu Umweltbelastung und -verschmutzung, die sich schädlich auf die menschliche Gesundheit auswirkt. Zudem gibt die Qualität der landwirtschaftlichen Produktionsmittel jüngst Anlass zur Besorgnis. Das beinhaltet den Verkauf von normalem Saatgut als Hybridsaatgut, Pestizide, die mit weniger wirksamen Chemikalien gemischt werden, oder Düngemittel, die weniger Nährstoffe enthalten als auf der Packung angegeben. Wir fokussieren unsere Forschungsarbeit auf die Nordchinesische Ebene, eine Region mit übermäßiger Nutzung und Qualitätsproblemen bei Düngemitteln. Die minderwertige Qualität der Düngemittel beschränkt sich jedoch nicht nur auf diese Region. So haben jüngste Berichte darauf hingewiesen, dass minderwertige landwirtschaftliche Produktionsmittel auch in anderen Ländern wie zum Beispiel Bangladesch, Kambodscha, Nigeria, Tansania und Vietnam ein Problem darstellen. Obwohl diese Dissertation sich auf Düngemittel fokussiert, kann ein Teil der verwendeten Methoden ausgebaut und dazu verwendet werden, die Auswirkungen anderer landwirtschaftlicher Produktionsmittel mit fragwürdiger Qualität, wie Saatgut und Pestizide, zu untersuchen. Das Thema dieser Arbeit ist in drei Unterthemen aufgeteilt: Effizienz, Wohlstandseffekte und Nutzungsintensität, drei unterschiedliche Aspekte der Auswirkungen von Düngemitteln mit mangelnder Qualität. Der Hauptbeitrag dieser Dissertation ist, dass wir den Einfluss von Düngemittelqualität auf die Effizienz und Nutzungsintensität sowohl theoretisch als auch empirisch untersuchen. Dies wurde trotz dem weitverbreiteten Problem der Düngerqualität bisher noch nicht erforscht. Der theoretische Beitrag umfasst das Ermitteln des Bias, der aus der Vernachlässigung des Qualitätsaspekts in der Schätzung der Produktionsfunktionen und der technischen Effizienz besteht. Dies ist insbesondere dann der Fall, wenn Düngerqualität im Forschungsgebiet ein Problem darstellt, wie etwa in China oder in anderen betroffenen Ländern. Wir präsentieren außerdem ein theoretisches Rahmenwerk, das die verschiedenen Erkenntnisse in der Literatur zur Richtung des Wohlstandseffekts auf Düngemittelnutzung zusammenführt. Es liefert eine konsistente Erklärung dafür, warum der Wohlstandseffekt unterschiedlich sein kann, wenn wir Regionen oder Landwirte mit unterschiedlichem Wohlstandsniveau betrachten. Der empirische Beitrag diese Dissertation besteht darin, die Größe der Schätzverzerrung bei der Elastizität der Produktionsmittel und der technischen Effizienz für unsere Forschungsregion, die Nordchinesische Ebene, quantitativ zu bestimmt. Dies stützt auch unsere theoretische Ableitung und zeigt, dass die Richtung des Wohlstandseffekts für Landwirte mit unterschiedlichem Wohlstandsniveau nicht konstant ist. Schließlich ermöglicht uns das Einbeziehen von Düngemitteltests in die Haushaltsbefragung sowohl den Zusammenhang zwischen wahrgenommener und tatsächlicher Düngerqualität genauer zu betrachten als auch zu sehen, wie diese die Nutzungsintensität von Dünger beeinflussen. Die Verschlechterung der Düngemittelqualität in der Nordchinesischen Ebene bereitet Anlass zur Sorge, da sie - wie diese Dissertation zeigt - zu einem Anstieg des Düngemitteleinsatzes, welcher in diesem Gebiet schon extrem hoch ist, führt. Dies bedeutet nicht nur eine Verschwendung wertvoller Ressourcen, sondern verursacht auch Umwelt- und gesundheitliche Probleme. Die derzeitige Subventionierung der Düngemittelherstellung ist dabei ein doppeltes Dilemma, da ein Niedrighalten des Produktpreises die Nutzung eines Produktionsmittels, welches bereits schon übermäßig eingesetzt wird, zusätzlich begünstigt. Das Vorhandensein von vielen Kleinproduzenten, die ineffizient wirtschaften, erschwert darüber hinaus die Qualitätskontrolle von Düngemitteln im Markt. Angesichts dieser Unzulänglichkeiten wäre es besser, den Fokus der Politikmaßnahmen von Preisreduktion auf Qualitätsverbesserung zu verlagern. Ein Vorschlag wäre, die Vergabe von Qualitäts-Gütesiegeln an zufriedenstellende Produkte zu fördern, wobei regelmäßige Tests von Seiten unabhängiger Dritter erfolgen sollten, um eine Verschlechterung der Qualität nach Erhalt des Siegels zu verhindern. Verantwortungsbewusste Produzenten der Branche könnten auch dabei helfen, ein sektorweites Überwachungsorgan zu bilden, um zu verhindern, dass ihr Image durch weniger verantwortungsvolle Hersteller getrübt wird. Ein weiterer Vorschlag wäre die Aufstockung von Ressourcen und Personal im neutralen Beratungsdienst, um den Informationsfluss zwischen politischen Entscheidungsträgern und Landwirten zu verbessern.

The aim of this article is to analyse the technical efficiency of Hungarian crop farms between 2001 and 2009 using panel data. We employ both standard stochastic frontier analysis and latent class model (LCM) to estimate technical efficiency. Our results suggest that technological heterogeneity plays important role in crop sector which traditionally is assumed by homogeneous technology. The comparison of standard SFA models assuming that the technology is common to all farms and LCM estimates highlights that the efficiency of crop farms may be underestimated using traditional SFA models.

This paper applies a stochastic frontier approach to analyze the evolution of technical efficiency in manufacturing as a source of regional growth, taking as a unit of analysis the Mexican states in the period 1988-2008. The main findings of our analysis are threefold. First, technical efficiency was increasing over the analyzed period and acted as a mechanism to reduce the labor productivity gap across states. Second, Mexican regions can increase manufacturing production about one third, on average, using the same amount of inputs which implies ample potential for regional growth. Third, there exists a considerable difference in the level of technological development, measured in terms of structural efficiency, of the north and the central regions with respect to the south that partially explains the labor productivity gap among regions.

Should inputs such as bank finance affect innovation in BRICS vs. developed countries similarly? Arguably these elasticities may depend on a country's economic progress (Gerschenkron, 1962; Liu and White, 2001). Applying a combination of DEA and Tobit to a sample of 22 countries, we show how innovation (measured patents, scientific publications and high-tech sectoral output) responds favourably to private-sector R&D. No significant differences are recorded for BRICS countries. Differences emerge between BRICS and non-BRICS for the elasticity of innovative efficiency to banking inputs.

This paper provides first micro-level evidence of the global university production frontier, allowing to estimate technical efficiencies of 273 top research universities across 29 countries between 2007 and 2009. Exploiting comparable international data improves the estimation of the production technology, allows to assess the distance of individual countries to the global frontier and enables comparison of university efficiencies between and across countries. The estimated input distance function uses undergraduate students, graduate students and citations to capture university outputs and staff to measure inputs. Contrasting two alternative econometric strategies to identify technical efficiency yields relatively stable results. Furthermore, the paper addresses the problem of unobserved heterogeneity by relating the obtained efficiency rankings to quality rankings and by exploiting the panel structure of the data to account for unobserved heterogeneity explicitly. The results suggest that technical efficiency rankings can be obtained in a relatively simple econometric setting., KOF Working Papers, 272

Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, den Zusammenhang zwischen der technischen Effizienz des Produktionsprozesses und dem wirtschaftlichen Erfolg landwirtschaftlicher Betriebe aufzudecken und betriebsspezifische Faktoren zu bestimmen, die diese beiden Größen beeinflussen. Wir analysieren hierfür ein unbalanciertes Panel von rund 2 000 Milchviehbetrieben in Bayern zwischen den Jahren 2000 und 2008. Die technische Effizienz der Betriebe wird mittels stochastischer Frontieranalyse untersucht. Der wirtschaftliche Erfolg der Betriebe wird durch die Kennzahl „Nettorentabilität“ erfasst. Die Ergebnisse zeigen eine durchschnittliche technische Effizienz von 88,2 % und eine durchschnittliche Nettorentabilität von etwa 57 %. Eine Rangkorrelationsanalyse zeigt einen hochsignifikanten positiven Zusammenhang zwischen diesen beiden Größen. Wir berechnen die marginalen Effekte möglicher Einflussfaktoren auf Effizienz und Erfolg und zeigen, dass sich die Ausbildung der Betriebsleiter, die Führung der Betriebe im Haupterwerb ebenso wie bessere natürliche Ertragsbedingungen positiv auf beide Größen auswirken. The objective of this article is to reveal the relationship between technical efficiency and the economic success of dairy farms and to determine farm specific factors affecting both. The data set contains observations of more than 2 000 Bavarian dairy farms in an unbalanced panel covering the years 2000 to 2008. We use the stochastic frontier approach to analyze the technical efficiency of farms. Economic success is measured by the performance indicator “Nettorentabilität”, which is the rate of return on farm owned production factors. Findings show an average technical efficiency of 88,2 % and an average “Nettorentabilität” of approximately 57 %. A rank correlation test indicates a strong positive relationship between technical efficiency and economic success. We calculate the marginal effects of possible determinants of technical efficiency and economic success and reveal that both improve with farm mangers education level, full-time farming and soil quality.

This paper studies Comprehensive Performance Assessment, an explicit incentive scheme for local government in England. Motivated by a simple theoretical political agency model, we predict that CPA should increase service quality and local taxation, but have an ambiguous effect on the efficiency of service provision. We test these predictions using a difference in difference approach, using Welsh local authorities as a control group, exploiting the fact that local authorities in Wales were not subject to the same CPA regime. To do this, we construct original indices of service quality and efficiency, using Best Value Performance Indicators. We estimate that CPA increased the effective band D council tax rate in England relative to Wales by 4%, and increased our index of service quality output also by about 4%, but had no significant effect on our efficiency indices. There is evidence of heterogeneous effects of CPA on efficiency, with some evidence that CPA impacted more on less efficient councils, and the 'harder test'; from 2005-8 having a much bigger effect. - local government ; incentives ; efficiency ; difference in difference ; DEA

Efforts undertaken by France to restructure the allocation of governmental competencies increased the importance of subnational governments by transferring additional tasks. This paper analyzes the efficiency of public spending on an intermediate government level for a sample of 96 départements in metropolitan France in 2008. Spending efficiency is measured using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Results indicate significant room for improvements and detect spending inefficiencies averaging between 10 and 22 percent, depending on model specification. To explain efficiency, a bootstrapped truncated regression, following Simar and Wilson (2007), is applied. The second-stage regression shows that efficiency is also determined by exogenous factors and identifies the distance to the national capital, inhabitants' income and the share of inhabitants of an age over 65 as significant determinants of efficiency.

In this paper we analyze the evolution of firm financial efficiency in the Czech Republic. Using a large panel of more than 400,000 Czech firm/years we study whether firms fully utilize their resources, how firm financial efficiency evolves over time, and how firm financial efficiency is determined by ownership structure. We employ a panel ver-sion of a stochastic production frontier model for the period 1996-2007 with time-invariant efficiency. We differentiate among various degrees of ownership concentra-tion and their domestic or foreign origin. In a two-stage set-up we estimate the degree of firm inefficiency and then we estimate the effect of ownership structure on the distance from the efficiency frontier. Our results support the hypothesis that concentration and foreign ownership are positively related to financial efficiency.

A country's production possibility frontier or PPF is defined as the boundary of its economy's production set in the net output space for a given technology and fixed quantities of primary factors of production. In general equilibrium theory, exogenous changes in technology or primary-factor supplies alter equilibrium prices; however, government-policy induced domestic relative commodity price changes do not alter the shape of an economy's production set. We show that, under international capital mobility, which is empirically significant, the shape of a country's production set does, in fact, depend on market forces and this shape can be manipulated by government policy.

In this paper we present a new approach to evaluate the environmental efficiency of decision making units. We propose a model that describes a two-stage process consisting of a production and an end-of-pipe abatement stage with the environmental efficiency being determined by the efficiency of both stages. Taking the dependencies between the two stages into account, we show how nonparametric methods can be used to measure environmental efficiency and to decompose it into production and abatement efficiency. For an empirical illustration we apply our model to an analysis of U.S. power plants.

Using firm-level data from nine developing countries we demonstrate that (a) certain institutions like restrictive labour market regulations that are considered to be bad for economic growth might be beneficial for production efficiency, whereas (b) good business environment which is considered to be beneficial for economic growth might have an adverse impact on production efficiency. We argue that our results suggest that the debate about the implications of institutional quality is far from being over, and classification of institutions into good and bad might be premature.

An economy's production set is the collection of all net output vectors that the economy is capable of producing with a given technology and fixed quantities of primary factors of production. The boundary of this set is called the production possibility frontier or PPF. We show that, if the efficiency-wage hypothesis holds, a country's PPF, though conceptually valid, is an operationally irrelevant concept, because the economy never operates on the PPF, which is a view that ought to be appreciated in light of persistent unemployment in the new structure of economies of the post-21st-Century-crisis world.

Egypt started a recent judicial reform program in 2007, which can be considered the first ever since the establishment of the National Egyptian Judicial System in 1952. It focuses mainly on solving organizational problems within First Instance Courts (FIC), as they form the active cell of the Egyptian judicial system. However the efficiency of FICs is still doubtable to a large extent. This paper provides for the first time an efficiency analysis of 22 FICs in Egypt using the technique of Data Envelop Analysis (DEA). The main strength of this study is to consider the number of computers per court, as none of the previous papers on court efficiency has included a capital variable when defining their court production function before. Our results show that there are no significant differences observed in terms of management efficiency between the civil and criminal FICs, however criminal FICs districts are superior with respect to their corresponding civil districts in terms of program efficiency.

In this paper we compare two flexible estimators of technical efficiency in a cross-sectional setting: the nonparametric kernel SFA estimator of Fan, Li and Weersink (1996) to the nonparametric bias corrected DEA estimator of Kneip, Simar and Wilson (2008). We assess the finite sample performance of each estimator via Monte Carlo simulations and empirical examples. We find that the reliability of efficiency scores critically hinges upon the ratio of the variation in efficiency to the variation in noise. These results should be a valuable resource to both academic researchers and practitioners.

This study uses the EU public power generating sector as a case study to investigate the environmental efficiency and productivity enhancing performance of the European Union's CO2 Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) in its pilot phase. Using Data Envelopment Analysis methods, we measure the environmental efficiency and the productivity growth registered in public power generation across the EU over the 1996-2007 period. In the second stage of our analysis we attempt to explain changes in productivity and efficiency over time using state-of-the-art econometric techniques. Our analysis suggests two conclusions: on the one hand carbon pricing led to an increase in environmental efficiency and to a shift outwards of the technological frontier; on the other hand, the overly generous allocation of emission permits had a negative impact on both measures. These results are shown to be robust to changes in controls and specifications.

Germany's water supply industry is characterized by a multitude of utilities and widely diverging prices, possibly resulting from structural differences beyond the control of firms' management, but also from inefficiencies. In this article we use Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis to determine the utilities' technical efficiency scores based on cross-sectional data from 373 public and private water utilities in 2006. We find large differences in technical efficiency scores even after accounting for significant structural variables like network density, share of groundwater usage and water losses.

Since the late 1990s, the European higher education system has had to face deep structural changes. With the public authorities seeking to create an environment of quasi-markets in the higher education sector, the increased competition induced by recent reforms has pushed all publicly financed higher education institutions to use their resources more efficiently. Higher education institutions increasingly now aim at differentiating themselves from their competitors in terms of the range of outputs they produce. Assuming that different market positioning strategies will have different effects on the performance of higher education institutions, this paper explores the existence of economies of scale and scope in the German higher education sector. Using an input-oriented distance function approach, we estimate the economies of scale and scope and the technical efficiency for 154 German higher education institutions from 2001 through 2007. Our results suggest that comprehensive universities should indeed orientate their activities to the concept of a full-university that combines teaching and research activities across a broad range of subjects. In contrast, praxis-oriented small and medium-sized universities of applied sciences should specialise in the teaching and research activities they conduct.

We examine micro-level channels of how financial development can affect macroeconomic outcomes like the level of income and export intensity. We investigate theoretically and empirically how financial constraints affect a firm's innovation and export activities, using unique firm survey data which provides direct measures for innovations and firm-specific financial constraints. We find that financial constraints restraint heability of domestically owned firms to innovate and export and hence to catch up to the technological frontiers. This negative effect is amplified as financial constraints force export and innovation activities to become substitutes although they are generally natural complements.

This paper analyzes the productivity development in the German public theater sector for the seasons 1991/1992-2005/2006. Using a stochastic distance frontier approach that allows to decompose total factor productivity change into different sources we examine (a) whether Baumol's cost-disease hypothesis is valid in this sector and (b) if so, whether its negative influence on productivity can be compensated by efficiency gains. The findings indicate an increase in real unit labor cost as a result of rising wage rates and, thus, support the cost- disease hypothesis. Furthermore, increasing returns to scale are observed for the majority of the theaters which implies that significant efficiency gains can be realized by the exploitation of scale economies. However, because of the increasing unit labor cost and an increasing scale inefficiency we find an overall decrease in average productivity of about 8 percent within the sample period.

To quickly adapt to technological change and developments, and thus remain competitive, firms increasingly resort to the use of external technology. This paper investigates whether and to what extent the acquisition of external disembodied technology affects the efficiency and productivity in innovation of technology acquiring firms. Using the stochastic frontier analysis combined with a difference-in-difference matching approach and firm-level panel from the German Innovation Survey for the period 1992-2004, we find that manufacturing firms that acquire disembodied technology experience more growth in innovative productivity than non-acquiring firms do. Thus, this study provides evidence on complementarity between internal and external R&D in innovation production, which is attributed by increasing returns to R&D scale and increasing technical efficiency. Moreover, we find that firm size significantly contributes to innovative efficiency and productivity of external technology acquirers.

In Amartya Sen's capability approach, policy makers can focus on different levels to influence the well-being of a society. We argue that improving capability to function as well as absolute levels of functioning achievement should be complemented by attention given to improving individuals' conversion efficency, i.e. the efficiency with which individual resources are converted into well-being. In order to examine effects of policies on conversion efficiency and to better understand the trajectories of human well-being over time, it is necessary to measure the development of conversion efficiency. We suggest an intertemporal index of conversion efficiency estimated via a nonparametric order-m approach borrowed from the production efficiency literature to analyze this development of our welfare measure. We exemplify this approach using micro level data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), tracking conversion efficiency for a set of basic functionings in Great Britain from 1991 to 2006. We find that under 30% of the British populace were efficient in their conversion of resources into functionings during the sample horizon. Moreover, age, education and self-employment increase an individual's conversion efficiency, while living in London, being disabled and being separated, divorced or widowed all decrease conversion efficiency. Being married also decreases the conversion efficiency and we find few evidence of gender disparities in conversion efficiency.

This paper studies the determinants of the inefficient functioning of the Tunisian labour market. The study takes advantage of recent developments in the stochastic frontier techniques and estimates the matching function for Tunisia using disaggregated data. We include control variables as determinants of matching efficiency and regional disparities. We confirm that the persistently high rate of unemployment is the result of not only excess labour supply but is also related to a shortfall between supply and demand, i.e. sector, location, qualification.

This study presents the results of an extensive Monte Carlo experiment to compare different methods of efficiency analysis. In addition to traditional parametric-stochastic and nonparametric-deterministic methods recently developed robust nonparametric-stochastic methods are considered. The experimental design comprises a wide variety of situations with different returns-to-scale regimes, substitution elasticities and outlying observations. As the results show, the new robust nonparametric-stochastic methods should not be used without cross-checking by other methods like stochastic frontier analysis or data envelopment analysis. These latter methods appear quite robust in the experiments.

Subsidies are considered important means to facilitate the provision of public transit, yet the empirical evidence implies that they can have harming effects on costs and possibly also on operators' performance. This paper examines the impacts of deficit-balancing subsidies on the cost inefficiency of local public bus companies in Germany, where a complex system allocates ample financial support. Our empirical analysis relies on a unique dataset of 33 companies observed over a period of up to twelve years for a total of 231 observations. We employ a stochastic frontier cost function for panel data that account for unobserved heterogeneity and provide firm-specific, time-varying inefficiency estimates. Further, we allow variations in the optimal technology by randomizing some cost functions' coefficients in one of our model specifications. Subsidies directly enter the inefficiency function as a heteroscedastic variable. We find a positive effect of subsidies on the standard deviation of inefficiency, which implies that the range of companies' inefficiency increases with the level of subsidies relative to total costs. However, we also find that non-subsidized firms perform better in terms of cost efficiency.

The stochastic frontier model with heterogeneous technical efficiency explained by exogenous variables is augmented with a sparse spatial autoregressive component for a cross-section data, and a spatial-temporal component for a panel data. An estimation procedure that takes advantage of the additivity of the model is proposed, computational advantages over simultaneous maximum likelihood estimation of all parameters is exhibited. The technical efficiency estimates are comparable to existing models and estimation procedures based on maximum likelihood methods. A spatial or spatial-temporal component can improve estimates of technical efficiency in a production frontier that is usually biased downwards.

Competitive tendering of local bus services in Germany has received increased attention. Employing Seemingly Unrelated Regression analyses, we observe that prices have regionally varying determinants; for example, while prices throughout most of the federal state of Hesse increase over time, prices in the Munich area decrease. Optimisation of bus utilisation in general has a cost-decreasing impact, confirming that public transport authorities can reduce prices via adequate transport planning. Furthermore, Stochastic Frontier Analysis shows that tender prices in Hesse are slightly less efficient. Moreover we conclude that the public transport authority's experience has an efficiency-increasing impact which supports the introduction of overarching authorities.

This paper examines micro-level channels of how financial development can affect macroeconomic outcomes like the level of income and export intensity. We investigate theoretically and empirically how financial constraints affect a firm's innovation and export activities, using unique firm survey data which provides direct measures for innovations and firm-specific financial constraints. We find that financial constraints restrain the ability of domestically owned firms to innovate and export and hence to catch up to the technological frontiers. This negative effect is amplified as financial constraints force export and innovation activities to become substitutes although they are generally natural complements.

We conduct an empirical analysis of the technical efficiency of cars sold in Germany in 2010. The analysis is performed using traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) as well as directional distance functions (DDF). The approach of DDF allows incorporating the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions as an environmental goal in the efficiency analysis. A frontier separation approach is used to gain deeper insight for different car classes and regions of origin. Natural gas driven cars and sports-utility-vehicles are also treated as different groups. The results show that the efficiency measurement is significantly influenced by the incorporation of carbon dioxide emissions. Moreover, we find that there is indeed a trade-off between technological performance and environmental performance.

Deutschland ist mit seiner starken Spezialisierung auf die Produktion von Investitionsgütern von der weltweiten Rezession besonders betroffen. Das technologieintensive Produktionsprofil seiner Industrie spricht aber dafür, dass Deutschland gestärkt aus der gegenwärtigen Wirtschaftskrise hervorgehen wird. In keinem anderen Industrieland ist die Ausrichtung der Produktion auf forschungsintensive Güter so stark wie hierzulande. Deutschland hat gegenüber seinen wichtigsten Wettbewerbern nicht nur im Fahrzeugbau, sondern auch im Maschinenbau, in der Nachrichtentechnik, in der Medizin- und in der Messtechnik seine Spitzenposition ausgebaut. Wesentliche Grundlagen des Erfolgs der deutschen Unternehmen sind nicht nur überzeugende Produkte, sondern auch im internationalen Vergleich effiziente Produktionsweisen.

Applying an outlier robust extension of the data envelopment analysis (DEA) followed by a geoadditive regression analysis, this study identifies and decomposes the efficiency of 439 German regions in using infrastructure and human capital. The findings show that the regions' efficiency is driven by a spatial and a non-spatial, arguably structural factor. As a consequence, concrete regional funding schemes, shaped by best practice results, might not be appropriate for all regions. Instead, a more differentiated funding scheme that accounts for both spatial and structural factors seems more promising.

This article provides an empirical insight on the heterogeneity in the estimates of banking efficiency produced by the stochastic frontier approach. Using data from five countries of Central and Eastern Europe, we study the sensitivity of the efficiency score and the efficiency ranking to a change in the design of the frontier. We found that the average scores are significantly smaller when the transcendental logarithmic functional form is used in the profit efficiency measurement and when the scaling effect is neglected in the cost efficiency measurement. The implied bank ranking is robust to changes in the stochastic frontier definition for cost efficiency, but not for profit efficiency.

This paper deals with integrating technology as well as lifestyles as driving forces of energy demand into a model of total private consumption. Private consumption is determined by economic variables like income and prices as well as these other factors. Technology is represented by variables measuring the efficiency of households' capital stocks and lifestyles by socio-demographic variables. Data for both types of variables are available in cross section consumer surveys and in time series data of aggregate consumption. The cross section surveys provide information on income and socio-demographic factors relevant for energy demand (characteristics of building and population density). The time series data contain information on prices and income as well as the energy efficiency embodied in household appliances. The final model of consumption consists of a consistent combination of both time series and cross section information into one comprehensive econometric model. This model describes demand for energy and non-energy commodities in an almost ideal demand system (AIDS) and is used in ex-post simulation exercises to isolate the impact of technological and socio-demographic variables on the demand for gasoline/diesel, heating and electricity.

This paper assesses the relative efficiency of knowledge production in the OECD using a nonparametric DEA approach. Resources allocated to R&D are limited and should therefore be used efficiently given the institutional and legal constraints. This paper presents efficiency scores based on an intertemporal frontier estimation for the period 1995 to 2004 and analyzes the impact of the regulatory environment using the single bootstrap procedure suggested by Simar and Wilson (2007). The empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that barriers to entry, aimed at reducing competition, lower research efficiency by attenuating the incentive to innovate and to allocate resources efficiently.

Payment scale economies affect banking costs, competition in payment services, and pricing. Our scale measure relates operating cost to physical measures of European banking "output", finding large economies. This differs from relating total cost to the value of balance sheet assets (the conventional approach). Interest expenses are excluded since differences here are primarily due to mix, not scale. Also, since standard indicators of competition can give inconsistent results, a revenue-based frontier measure is developed and applied to European banks, with little difference evident across countries. Existing differences in bank prices (EC report) are associated with small differences in competition.

This paper provides an empirical demonstration for a practical approach of efficiency evaluation against the background of limited data availability in some regulated industries. Here, traditional DEA may result in a lack of discriminatory power when high numbers of variables but only limited observations are available. We apply PCA-DEA for radial efficiency measurement to US natural gas transmission companies in 2007. This allows us to reduce dimensions of the optimization problem while maintaining most of the variation in the original data. Our results suggest that the PCA-DEA methodology reduces the probability of over-estimation of the individual firm-specific performance. It also allows for a large number of original variables without substantially reducing the discriminatory power of the model.

Most previous research on efficiency in banking takes a regulatory perspective. In contrast, this paper investigates the empirical relation between efficiency and profitability in five large economies of the European Union during the period 1998-2005 and discusses the results from the perspective of corporate bank strategy. Methodologically the existing literature is expanded by the use of DEA super-efficiency values to regress profitability, the incorporation of risk by calculative costs of capital, and a model specification built on the modern understanding of banks as centers of value creation. The results of the conducted static and dynamic regression analyses show that profitable banks operate with higher technical efficiency than their competitors. Furthermore, the strategic environment and in this regard the structure and concentration of the national financial sector have a considerable impact on a bank's financial performance. Both issues proved to be statistically and economically significant. Thus, the results support the appropriateness of the generic strategy of cost leadership for the European banking market. Banks following this strategic position were able to achieve higher excess returns during the analyzed period.

In this paper we investigate the determinants of local governments' technical efficiency in road maintenance for a panel of German counties using a broad variety of estimation approaches. More specifically, we calculate efficiency indices using non-parametric (DEA) and parametric (stochastic frontier analysis) reference technologies, and examine how these efficiency indices can be explained by estimating and comparing four different regression models. The results of our analysis show that (controlling for numerous characteristics of the counties) the disposable income of the counties' citizens, intergovernmental grants (for county roads), and the payments to the counties influence efficiency negatively. Concerning political variables we find weak evidence that efficiency decreases with an increasing share of seats of left-wing parties in the county council; the hypothesis that efficiency decreases with the degree of political concentration in the county council could not be confirmed.