Turkish electricity reform is entering a new phase through the Turkish Government's proposal to create 21 new distribution companies, 18 of them through merger. Two aspects of merger analysis are the operational cost savings and the potential production efficiency gains. This paper concentrates...

This paper analyses the production technology of Portuguese banks during the 1992-2004 period through the estimation of a translog cost frontier. Banks are modelled as firms which produce loans and other earning assets, choosing the cost minimizing combination of labour, capital and interest...

Despite the great achievement of three decades of economic reform, the Chinese banking sector takes the blame for its dysfunctional system, especially the large amount of non-performing loans. The ease of foreign banks' entry set by the WTO from December 2007 raises our concern of the capability...

The merger of police services in the UK has been suggested on the grounds that efficiency improvements will be possible. This paper applies a public good model of the police service to evaluate the potential efficiency gains from mergers of police services in England and Wales. It uses a...

For several years electricity distribution companies have been using efficiency and productivity analysis in the form of data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis to analyse their operations. This reflects both market forces and responses to regulatory incentives. However we...

The paper investigates the impact of country size on aggregate national efficiency, using a nonparametric programming methodology to measure output distance functions and relative national efficiency for a group of 85 developing countries over the period 1980-89. Tobit regression models are...

"This paper examines the economic implications of the privatisation that has been occurring in Europe. Different sectors and different countries have developed separately, but policymakers can learn common lessons. Considerable experience of privatisation has produced a mounting body of...

This paper considers panel data procedures for regulatory benchmarking that allow for both latent heterogeneity and inefficiency, encapsulating the regulatory dilemma in comparative efficiency analysis for incentive regulation. It applies a distance function model with appropriate concavity...

This paper surveys the application of efficiency and productivity analysis to recent regulatory experience, especially in Europe. From a review of regulatory case studies, particularly of network industries, it is clear that regulatory practice differs from theoretical precedent in choice of...

This paper evaluates the performance of Egyptian banks during a period characterised by changes in economic policies. The Egyptian government's liberalisation policies in the early 1990s have had a positive or negative impact on the performance of the Egyptian banks. In addition, whether the...