Mercedes Beltrán-Esteve

Assessing eco-efficiency with directional distance functions

Eco-efficiency is a matter of concern at present that is receiving increasing attention in political, academic and business circles. Broadly speaking, this concept refers to the ability to create more goods and services with less impact on the environment and less consumption of natural resources, thus involving both economic and also ecological issues. In this paper we propose the use of directional distance functions and Data Envelopment Analysis techniques to assess eco-efficiency. More specifically, we show how these functions can be used to compute a wide range of indicators representing different objectives regarding economic and ecological performance. This methodological approach is applied to a sample of Spanish olive-growing farms to illustrate its great potential to provide policymakers and farm managers with sound information as a basis for strategic decision making. We also suggest further avenues to explore in this burgeoning line of research.

Assessing the performance of the Latin American and Caribbean banking industry: Are domestic and foreign banks so different?

Abstract This paper studies the relative performance of domestic and foreign banks in the Latin American and Caribbean banking industry. Data Envelopment Analysis is used to compute technical efficiency scores for the years 2001 and 2013. Our main contribution is twofold. On the one hand, we assess performance at the level of the management of specific production factors. On the other hand, we distinguish program efficiency from managerial efficiency, which allows us to evaluate whether the differences in technical efficiency between national and foreign banks are due to the use of different technologies (program efficiency) or, conversely, differences in the managerial capacities of managers in both categories of banks (managerial efficiency). The results show that foreign banks are more efficient than domestic ones, and provide evidence that the greater efficiency of foreign banks is mostly due to the superior technology they use.