This note provides an introduction to two prominent econometric benchmarking methods: Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis. It discusses the econometric techniques, provides a practical example using the World Bank's Enterprise Survey data, and offers conclusions for...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a widely applied nonparametric method for comparative evaluation of firms’ efficiency. A deficiency of DEA is that the efficiency scores assigned to each firm are sensitive to sampling variations, particularly when small samples are used. In addition, an...

Agricultural productivity in Africa from 1971 to 2000 is examined using the recently developed metafrontier function technique, for the purpose of studying differences in efficiency and technology gap across different regions of the continent. The results support the view that technology gap...

This research analyses the performance of Portuguese metros in the European context. By means of two non-parametric benchmarking techniques, respectively performance indicators and data envelopment analysis, we compute the efficiency of 37 European metros. In order to provide statistical...

In a period of increasing foreign bank entry, the popular question of “what does foreign bank entry bring to the Turkish banking sector?” can partly be answered with respect to the productivity effects. This paper aims to find the productivity change in the banking sector between 1990 and...