Since the open door policy was embarked upon in 1979, China s banking sector has undergone gradual but notable reforms. A key objective of the reforms implemented by the Chinese government is to build an effective, competitive and stable banking system in order to improve its efficiency and...

In a stochastic decision environment, differences in information can lead rational decision makers facing the same stochastic technology and the same markets to make different production choices. Efficiency and productivity measurement in such a setting can be seriously and systematically biased...

The technical and allocative efficiency of broadacre farmers in a southern region of Western Australia is investigated over a three-year period. Applying data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) reveals there is some inefficiency in each year, which decreases over...

This study examines productivity growth of 3 ECOWAS crops, namely, rice, cotton and millet, using both Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) and Data Envelopment analysis (DEA). The data cover a 45 year period (1961-2005). Calculations are based on data collected from FAOSTAT database,...

Purpose -The use of public-private partnerships (P3s) for infrastructure delivery, particularly for highway projects, has been increasing in the USA. The purpose of this paper is to empirically evaluate the difference of P3s and non-P3 highway projects, in terms of their costs and efficiency....

The paper presents a rigorous frontier-analysis of technical efficiency, returns to scale and the composition of productivity growth of the Italian prison system over the period 2003-2005. The study tries to fill some gaps in the literature on the subject, which mainly suffers from both...

The study was carried out to provide empirical evidence on technical efficiency of maize production in Nigeria using parametric and non-parametric approaches. The study employed annual secondary data on maize production in Nigeria from 1971 to 2010.Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) and Data...

Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the...

Despite progress in the past decade, financial markets in Colombia remain relatively small and shallow. In particular the banking system suffers high intermediation costs, which limit constrains access to finance by households and firms. This paper explores some of the causes behind these...

This study presents some quantitative evidence from a number of simulation experiments on the accuracy of the productivity growth estimates derived from growth accounting (GA) and frontier-based methods (namely Data envelopment Analysis-, Corrected ordinary least squares-, and Stochastic...