The paper investigates the impact of subsidies and of para-agriculture on the technical efficiency of organic farms in Switzerland, Austria and Southern Germany. The data-set consists of bookkeeping data with 1,704 observations in the years 2003 to 2005. Technical efficiency is modelled using a...

Recently the notion and the measurement of destination competitiveness have received increasing attention in the economics literature on tourism. The reason for this interest emerges from both the increasing economic importance of the tourist sector and the increasing competition on the tourist...

The recent dramatic change in energy supply in Japan has prompted a search for a new energy-environment-economic efficiency policy, in which a compromise has to be found between a sufficient supply of energy resources, the development of low carbon emission technology, and a continuation of...

In recent years, migrant entrepreneurs have come to occupy a prominent place in the SME sector in many cities in developed countries, with varying degrees of success. The concept of migrant entrepreneurship suggests a homogeneous set of actors, but it remains to be seen whether differences in...

We propose a two-stage procedure for finding realistic benchmarks for nonparametric efficiency analysis. On the first stage the efficient DMUs are figured out by a free disposal hull approach. These benchmarks are directly targeted by directional distance functions and the extent of inefficiency...

Japan is faced with a gFukushima f problem, meaning a nuclear accident leading to electrical power shortage. This problem relates to a non-balanced gEnergy-Environment-Economic h policy which does not, but should incorporate gelectrical power saving h, glow carbon emission h, and geconomic...

In the spirit of the deregulation movement, Japan is also faced with an gAsia Open Sky h agreement which favours aviation liberalization in international services. This means an end to Japan's aviation policy of isolation. In association with this policy change, also environmental concerns grew...

Standard Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is characterized by uniform proportional input reduction or output augmentation in calculating improvement projections. This paper develops a new Euclidean Distance Minimization model in the context of DEA in order to derive a more appropriate...