A cost-efficiency analysis of European air navigation service providers

For a number of years there has been a tendency towards the privatization of Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs), particularly in Europe. In this article a definition of the term ‘privatization’ will be outlined. Furthermore, the authors provide a review of the history of the English, French and German ANSPs in order to illustrate the differences in the development of European ANSPs. Thereafter, arguments for and against privatization will be summarized. During the last decade the European Union has strengthened its efforts in air law, as demonstrated by the issuance of the Single European Sky Regulations. Therefore, it is necessary to review the status of existing European ANSPs and their compliance with EU laws. Subsequently, the authors demonstrate that there is a trend towards commercialization, even though no mandatory rules are prescribed for the privatization of the core functions of ANSPs.

This paper deals with the on-going process of commercialisation of air navigation service providers (ANSPs) with specific focus on Europe. First part offers overview of conducted research on their commercialisation and identifies two main external drivers for the emergence of commercialisation – liberalisation of national markets and demand for other ANS related services. Our research also proposes methodology for numerical assessment of the degree of commercialisation based on the ANSP’s Commercialisation Index (ACI) and presents numerical evaluation of the ACI index of 35 European providers and proposes six different categories of providers reflecting different degree of their commercialisation. Results reveal that 63% of the European ANSPs show signs of commercialisation. On top of that, our outcomes prove that corporatisation cannot be considered a direct manifestation of commercialisation. Despite the most widely accepted view that corporatised providers are commercially active, the findings show that almost 40% of corporatised European ANSPs are not commercially active. The paper also claims that ownership of subsidiaries and joint ventures is the most dominant demonstration of commercialisation. At the same time, our outcomes show that the provision and development of commercial services and products related to ANS are the most common commercial activities of the European ANSPs.

This work analyzes the impact of energy governance on energy efficiency in a set of 29 OECD countries. A Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) approach is conducted to estimate the energy efficiency levels in this sample of countries between 2000 and 2015. Energy governance is measured by an Energy Efficiency Governance Index (EEGI) constructed in Barrera-Santana et al. (2020). The results suggest that increasing the average quality of energy governance by 10% could raise energy efficiency levels by around 9.20%, according to the estimate of our preferred SFA model. To achieve this outcome there are two key requirements: set quantified and achievable targets, and carry out an extensive evaluation of the results of energy policies. Our results are robust to different econometric approaches and variations of the EEGI.

This paper examines the convergence properties as well as the causal nexus between bank competition and efficiency in five regional economic communities of Africa over the 2007–2014 period. We estimate bank market power, cost and profit efficiency using the stochastic frontier analysis approach and employ β and σ convergence tests to assess the relative speed of banking convergence in Africa and the five sub-regional markets over the 2007–2014 period using data from 405 banks from 47 African countries. We further examine the causal nexus between bank competition and efficiency in these markets using Granger-type causality tests. The results show a steady rise in bank competition and efficiency in Africa and the five sub-regional markets overtime. The gradual convergence of bank competition and efficiency in the selected markets also reflects the benefits of financial integration in emerging markets. The results also support the quiet life hypothesis in Africa, especially in the East African Community, and reject the quiet life hypothesis in the AMU and ECCAS banking markets. We further found evidence of the efficient structure hypothesis in Africa, especially in the Arab Maghreb Union and Southern African Development Community.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the efficiency of East Java rice production in 2018. This study uses a model for measuring the efficiency of stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). Empirical results of these findings indicate that the efficiency of rice production in East Java in 2018 was said to be very efficient in several districts and towns affected by the variable dry milled grain / GKG and irrigation variables, although there are still some districts and towns that cannot be said to be productive. Additionally, the explanatory variable of population growth affects the technical inefficiency of East Java rice production in 2018. Based on the results of this study's review, the practical implications for the government must continue to work to increase the scale and impact of efficiency on rice production, particularly on adding irrigated land to rice commodities, so that rice production can increase to the maximum and domestic food needs can be satisfied. Since the population of Indonesia continues to rise significantly, and rice is in fact a staple food for the people of Indonesia, rice production needs to be increased to ensure national social security. For this reason, it is necessary for the government to pay more attention to policies regarding the use and addition of paddy fields in order to keep optimum domestic rice production.

Rice agribusiness in Indonesia must be competitive so that food security can be realized. T herefore , it is necessary to improve performance in each subsystem. One of the subsystems that needs to be improved is the downstream subsystem, which is processing grain (drying and rice milling). Snowball sampling technique was applied to select 60 commercial rice mills in three sub - district. Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) was used to estimate technical efficiency and to find the sources of inefficiency of the r ice milling business in Cianjur Regency. The results showed that rice mills in study site was ineffecient. Factors that are affecting the technical efficiency of rice milling business in Cianjur Regency are the level of formal education, rice yield, and gr ain moisture content. Technical efficiency is positively corelated with the gains of rice milling business. Profits can be used for reinvestment (especially in milling machines), so that the efficiency of the rice milling business can be increased. In addi tion, the rice byproduct industry needs more attention to increase the benefits of the rice milling business.

In order to improve the performance of the trade balance, Indonesia is currently always trying to diversify the market through the expansion of export markets to non-traditional countries. For this reason, measuring competitiveness and export efficiency is crucial to be researched first. This study aims to measure the competitiveness and efficiency of Indonesia's Non-Oil and Gas Exports to Non-Traditional Markets by using the analysis methods RCA, EPD, X-Model and Stochastic Frontier Analysis with Gravity Model (SFGM). The results of the analysis show that based on the results of the competitiveness analysis (RCA) and export performance using EPD and X-Model, it shows that the competitiveness of Indonesia's non-oil and gas exports to non-traditional countries is still low or below global competitiveness. Meanwhile, the results of estimation using the Stochastic Frontier Analysis approach with the Gravity Model (SFGM) show that the variables of GDP of non-traditional countries, the number of population of non-traditional countries, Indonesia's GDP, competitiveness (RCA) and the area of non-traditional countries have a positive and significant effect on Indonesia's exports. Meanwhile, economic distance is estimated to have a negative and significant influence on Indonesia's non-oil and gas exports.

Split incentive problem in the uptake of new ATM technology

Disruptive Innovation in an Institutionalized Environment: Space-based ADS-B in the Air Traffic Management Industry

While liberalization has made great strides in both airlines and airports, the third, critical, component of the air transportation system still lags behind: air navigation services, and the entities that supply them, the air navigation service providers. Still, since New Zealand first started experimenting with commercialization in 1987, the air navigation services industry around the world has evolved tremendously. From being traditionally provided by the government or the military, air navigation service providers now come in a variety of institutional arrangements, including government corporations, non-profit private entities and public–private partnerships. This chapter explores those changes and their impacts, with a focus on two case studies in North America: the US and Canada. These are two interesting contrasting ANSPs: one that underwent institutional reform (Canada) and one that did not (US).

This study adopts the relatively novel stochastic frontier analysis approach in examining cost efficiency and its determinants in the Nigerian banking sector, focusing on the dual effects of bank specific factors and macroeconomic variables. Data were sourced from the annual reports of sixteen Nigerian commercial banks over a 13-year period, spanning from 2006 to 2018. The results show that Nigeria banks are generally cost-efficient with asset quality and regulatory quality enhancing the efficiency, while inflation and financial capital undermines it. The efficiency score measures how efficient banks are in the combination of labour, capital, and financial capital to produce an optimal combination of deposits collection and loans creation. The banks are estimated to be efficient at 82 percent given their strategy of transforming deposits into short- and long-term loans, with macroeconomic stability contributing significantly to banks and financial system efficiency.

This paper extends the concept of methodological crosschecking by examining whether bank efficiencies computed by the two frontier techniques, stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA), are consistent. The study used a panel of 220 unbalanced observations from 27 Ghanaian banks between 2007 and 2016 to estimate cost and technical efficiencies and check for consistency using five criteria: efficiency distribution, ranking, ability to identify best or worst banks, stability of efficiencies, and relationship with accounting ratios. The results suggest that there is no consistency in the way parametric and non-parametric techniques rank or identify the best or worst banks. Also, there exists a weak relationship between the efficiency scores generated by both SFA and DEA and the non-frontier accounting ratios of Ghanaian banks. This suggests that the latter may contain some exogenous variables that make them weak measures of efficiency and should be used with caution, especially for bank supervision. However, the SFA approach yielded efficiency scores that were comparatively more stable over time. Therefore, the study concludes that the SFA approach is more practical and thus more appealing for regulatory purposes in Ghana due to the relatively consistent efficiency scores under the SFA approach compared to those under the DEA.

Banking Reform and Efficiency in China: 1995-2008

Software as a Service (SaaS) has been one of the fastest-growing delivery models in the software industry. The industry's trade press often considers economies of scale as the main benefit of SaaS firms, because information technology management and the associated resources are centralized at the SaaS vendors. However, centralized information technology management also requires the associated cost of expanding the firm's IT infrastructure to serve more customers. Intuitively, it is not necessary that the former effect must dominate the latter. Using public firm-level data from Compustat, this study attempts to analyze the economies of scale of SaaS firms relative to their traditional counterparts by using the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) approach. Our empirical findings suggest SaaS firms have smaller economies of scale than traditional software firms. By utilizing the technical efficiency score obtained from SFA, we further examine the effects of R&D expense and advertising expense on technical efficiency. The analysis suggests that R&D expense, not the advertising expense, could be the cause of smaller economies of scale at SaaS firms.

Firms in the world today are pushed to demonstrate objectively that they are able to comply with increasingly stringent requirements to become part of sustainable supply chains. One of the most widely applied practice is the implementation of management systems’ certifications that contribute to increase the efficiency and competitive advantage of firms. Relying in the resource-based view of the firm, the aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certifications on the productive efficiency of the firm. Specifically, the analysis considers three stages of the certification life-cycle: certification itself, withdrawal (decertification), and retrieval (recovery).Based on a longitudinal sample of 918 European and Asian firms from 2010 to 2019, and relying on a stochastic frontier analysis approach, this work presents empirical evidence on the effects of these certifications on firms’ productive efficiency along the certification life-cycle. Differences in countries and industries have been also found.The main findings suggest that ISO 9001 is the main driver of productive efficiency, mainly when combined with ISO 14001 as well as in the triple certification. Withdrawals and retrievals are not found to increase productive efficiency in most of the cases, probably because of the internalization of these practices. However, productive efficiency is hindered by the simultaneous withdrawal of ISO 9001+ISO 14001, whereas it is increased with the withdrawal of OHSAS 18001. Finally, the retrieval of ISO 9001 hinders productive efficiency.The main contributions of this paper are three: to analyze the impact of different combinations of certifications on productive efficiency; to study this relationship along the certification lifecycle, and to contribute to the resource-based view theory because these practices are unique resources which management allow firms to gain competitive advantage.