Congestion in the Chinese automobile and textile industries revisited

This paper re-examines a problem of congested inputs in the Chinese automobile and textile industries, which was identified by Cooper et al. (Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 35 (2001) 227-242). These authors employed a single approach to measuring congestion, however, so it is of interest to see whether other approaches would yield very different answers as regards the severity of this problem. Indeed, the measurement of congestion is an area where there has been much theoretical debate but relatively little empirical work. Here we use the data set assembled by Cooper et al. for the period 1981-1997 to compare and contrast the measurements of congestion generated by three alternative approaches. We find that these measurements are indeed very different.