Title: Air transport performance: current evidences about the efficiency of Italian airports

Authors: Juan Gabriel Brida; Vincenzo Fasone; Pablo Daniel Monterubbianesi; Sandra Zapata-Aguirre

Addresses: Universidad de la República, Montevideo-Uruguay, Free University of Bolzano, Piazza Università 1, I-39100 Bolzano, Italy ' Kore University of Enna, Cittadella Universitaria, 94100 Enna, Italy ' Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur, Universidad Nacional del Sur-CONICET, Argentina ' Kore University of Enna, Cittadella Universitaria, 94100 Enna, Italy

Abstract: This paper analyses the performance of Italian airports. We construct and estimate a data envelopment analysis, under Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes (CCR), Banker, Charnes and Cooper (BCC) and superefficiency models, in order to obtain efficiency scores for 14 airports for the period 2009-2011. In addition, we use a Malmquist Index for measuring the evolution of the productivity of individual airports along the time. The results show that Genoa, Rome, Naples, Bergamo and Bologna exhibit the best practices when distributing efficiently their production factor available to face an increase in the demand, keeping this behavior during all the period under study. These airports are efficient in both constant returns to scale (CRS) and variable returns to scale (VRS), indicating that scale is the prevailing source of efficiency.

Keywords: airports; airport efficiency; Italy; productivity; performance measurements; benchmarking; data envelopment analysis; DEA; super efficiency modelling; Malmquist productivity index; best practice; increased demand; constant returns to scale; CRS; variable returns to scale; VRS; air transport; airline industry.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBPM.2014.065024

International Journal of Business Performance Management, 2014 Vol.15 No.4, pp.351 - 371

Received: 24 Dec 2013
Accepted: 28 Apr 2014

Published online: 30 Sep 2014 *

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