This paper applies a new variant of data envelopment analysis model to examine the performance of Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India. The findings show a significant heterogeneity visible in the cost efficiency scores within 19 years. The decline in performance after 1994-95 can be taken...

We introduce an ordinal model of efficiency measurement. Our primitive is a notion of e ciency that is comparative, but not cardinal or absolute. In this framework, we postulate axioms that we believe an ordinal efficiency measure should satisfy. Primary among these are choice consistency and...

Neoclassical growth accounting is a methodology used to measure the contribution of different production factors to economic growth and to indirectly compute the rate of technological progress. This model assumes constant returns to scale and perfectly competitive factor markets, which implies...

In this paper, we measure and analyse profit efficiency and productivity of Vietnamese banks using a newly developed index approach which is based on the directional distance function. Our findings indicate that the average bank operates quite far below the frontier of the best-practice bank,...

The paper investigates the organization of the Italian water sector in the light of the reforms of public utilities. The aim is to examine the degree of implementation of the water sector reform (the so-called Galli Law of 1994) and assess the performance of operators through a study of their...

In this paper, we investigate productivity growth in 55 major Australian urban water utilities using nonparametric frontier techniques over the period 2005/06 to 2008/09. The five outputs included in the analysis are chemical and microbiological compliance, and the inverses of real loses per...