Pablo Daniel Monterubbianesi

Air transport performance: current evidences about the efficiency of Italian airports

This paper analyses the performance of Italian airports. We construct and estimate a data envelopment analysis, under Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes (CCR), Banker, Charnes and Cooper (BCC) and superefficiency models, in order to obtain efficiency scores for 14 airports for the period 2009-2011. In addition, we use a Malmquist Index for measuring the evolution of the productivity of individual airports along the time. The results show that Genoa, Rome, Naples, Bergamo and Bologna exhibit the best practices when distributing efficiently their production factor available to face an increase in the demand, keeping this behavior during all the period under study. These airports are efficient in both constant returns to scale (CRS) and variable returns to scale (VRS), indicating that scale is the prevailing source of efficiency.

Eficiencia del Gasto Total en Salud: Análisis no paramétrico en una muestra amplia de países

OBJECTIVE To measure the efficiency of 190 countries in producing health results and the factors that determine such efficiency. METHODOLOGY A data envelopment analysis was conducted on worldwide data from the year 2009 in order to estimate the efficient frontier, based on total health expenditure per capita, as well on infant mortality rate and life expectancy at birth. At the same time, an analysis of the determinants of expenditure efficiency was performed through Tobit models. RESULTS African nations have lower technical and allocative efficiency, but higher scale efficiency. The quality of institutions has a statistically significant impact on the levels of technical and allocative efficiency and on the levels of scale efficiency. The percentage of health expenditure financed by private insurers has an impact on technical and allocative efficiency, while urbanization rates affect the scale efficiency. DISCUSSION the fact that more than 70 % of countries show decreasing returns suggest that, once certain minimal standards of life quality are achieved, the marginal effect of each additional dollar assigned to health is not substantial. Conversely, in poor countries, where the expenditure in health presents increasing returns, the health performance could be substantially better by marginally raising the expenditure. On the other hand, financing structures of health expenditures may influence technical-allocative efficiency, while urbanization levels may impact scale efficiency (source: MeSH, NLM).