Increasing energy efficiency is a key global policy goal for climate protection. An important step toward an optimal reduction of energy consumption is the identification of energy saving potentials in different sectors and the best strategies for increasing efficiency. This paper analyzes these...

Eco-efficiency refers to the ability to produce more goods and services with less impact on the environment and less consumption of natural resources. This issue has become a matter of concern that is receiving increasing attention from politicians, scientists and researchers. Furthermore,...

The evaluation of market structures and the quantification of returns to scale in network industries usually are of high interest for researchers and policy makers. Regarding the debate on optimal market structures in German potable water supply, we use a cross-sectional sample of 364 German...

The integration of European services markets and the implementation of associated European Union directives open up formerly closed national markets to competition from the Single Market. The purpose of this study is to measure the effects of liberalization on technical efficiency and the...

This article develops a simple, but informative, approach to measure technical changes by applying the Malmquist index framework using data envelopment analysis (DEA). A set of directional vectors is used to capture complete information regarding the overall shift in the technology frontier; we...

While there is rich literature covering theoretical concepts of transaction costs very few empirical strategies have been provided to estimate them. The theoretical framework proposed in this paper is based on a unit value decomposition and dedines transaction costs as the difference between a...

The returns to scale for nineteen South Asian countries are estimated using window and cumulative rolling stochastic frontier regression analysis. The stochastic frontier analysis accounts for technical inefficiency of Hicks non-neutral technology production function in the estimation of the...

Supermarkets are gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on productivity and efficiency have hardly been studied. We use a meta-frontier approach and combine this with propensity...

This study investigates the Indonesian cocoa production to reveal the possibilities for poverty alleviation while considering the threats to environmental sustainability. We estimate, based on a large household panel data set and stochastic frontier analysis, the technical efficiency of cocoa...