Search results for "Production–possibility frontier"

Cost-effective forest conservation and criteria for potential conservation targets: a Finnish case study

2008

International audience; Selecting reserves for forest biodiversity maintenance is often done by setting criteria for components of structural elements of biodiversity, such as a volume of decaying wood. We tested how the different threshold values for the components of structural elements affect the cost-effective site selection. Using Finnish National Forest Inventory information and remote sensing data, we determined a habitat quality index and economic value for each site in Satakunta region in Finland. Moreover, we defined several sets of potential conservation targets using alternative criteria for the habitat quality index developed for the Finnish case study. These figures were used …

2019

Conflicts between biodiversity conservation and resource production can be mitigated by multi-objective management planning. Optimizing management for multiple objectives over larger land areas likely entails trading off the practicability of the process against the goodness of the solution. It is therefore worthwhile to resolve how large areas are required as management planning regions to reconcile conflicting objectives as effectively as possible. We aimed to reveal how the extent of forestry planning regions impacts the potential to mitigate a forestry-conservation conflict in Finland, represented as a trade-off between harvest income and deadwood availability. We used forecasted data f…

Evolución de la eficiencia técnica de la industria textil española en el periodo 1995-2005. Análisis mediante un modelo frontera estocástica*

2021

La industria textil española, con un peso relativo importante en la manufactura, se encuentra sumida en una profunda crisis como consecuencia de la cada vez más agresiva e intensa competencia ejercida por los países productores de bajo coste. Si bien la eficiencia no agota el conjunto de estrategias para ser competitivo, la presencia de competidores induce a su búsqueda (Porter, 1990). En este trabajo se examina la evolución de la eficiencia técnica del textil español. Con tal finalidad, para el periodo 1995-2005 y cada uno de los siete grupos de actividad en que puede subdividirse la industria textil, se estima una frontera de producción estocástica de tipo translog. Los resultados empíric…

Education, Growth and Development

2016

The link between higher-education investment and growth is more relevant when a country’s economy is no longer based on imitation, and begins to rely instead, on innovation as the main engine for growth. The knowledge triangle – research, education and innovation – was a core factor in European efforts to meet the Lisbon strategy and its stated objective that knowledge should help the European economy become the most dynamic knowledge-based one in the world. The failure of the Lisbon strategy was later conducive to a new ambitious scheme, namely Horizon 2020. Human capital, when transposed to educational matters, helps put forward an assessment of the relevance of the neo-Schumpeterian view…

Assessment of Tourist Competitiveness by Analysing Destination Efficiency

2006

Recently the notion and the measurement of destination competitiveness have received increasing attention in the economics literature on tourism. The reason for this interest emerges from both the increasing economic importance of the tourist sector and the increasing competition on the tourist market as a consequence of the transition from mass tourism to a new age of tourism that calls for a tailor-made approach to the specific attitudes and needs of tourists. The central subject of this paper - inspired by the conceptual competitiveness model developed earlier by Crouch and Ritchie - concerns the efficiency of tourist site destinations. Using a dataset of 103 Italian regions for the year…

ASSESSMENT OF TOURISM COMPETITIVENESS BY ANALYSING DESTINATION EFFICIENCY

2008

The notion and measurement of destination competitiveness have received increasing attention in the economics literature on tourism. The reason for this emerges from both the growing economic importance of the tourist sector and the increasing competition in the tourist market resulting from the transition from mass tourism to a new age of tourism that calls for a tailor-made approach to the specific attitudes and needs of tourists. The central subject of this paper – inspired by the conceptual competitiveness model developed by Crouch and Ritchie – concerns the efficiency of tourist site destinations. Using a data set of 103 Italian regions for 2001, an economic efficiency analysis is car…

Assessing the productivity change of water companies in England and Wales: A dynamic metafrontier approach

2017

The assessment of productivity change and its drivers across water companies and over time is a powerful tool for both regulators and companies when setting water tariffs. Water and sewerage companies (WaSCs) and water only companies (WoCs) provide different services. Hence, their productivity change cannot directly be evaluated jointly. In this paper and for the first time, we provide a pioneering approach to assess and compare the dynamics of productivity change of WaSCs and WoCs. To achieve this, both the traditional Malmquist productivity index and the metafrontier Malmquist productivity index and its components are computed to assess the productivity change for a sample of English and …

The Luenberger productivity indicator in the water industry: An empirical analysis for England and Wales

2014

Abstract We innovate in the field of water companies' performance with an application of the directional distance function and the Luenberger productivity indicator (LPI) to the assessment of water companies' productivity growth. The advantage of our approach is that it takes into account both input contractions and output expansions. The analysis covered 22 water companies from England and Wales using data over the period 2001–2008. To the best of our knowledge, there are no prior studies applying the Luenberger productivity indicator to the water industry in England and Wales or other countries. For the sake of comparison, the traditional Malmquist productivity index (MPI) was also estima…

Hotel chain performance: a gravity-DEA approach

2011

Performance in business management can be measured in terms of competitiveness and efficiency. Generally speaking, competitiveness is a comparative concept of the ability of a firm, sub-sector or country to sell and supply goods and/or services in a given market, as measured by its market share. Particularly in competitive markets, efficiency plays a key role in determining this ability but it is not, by itself, sufficient. Indeed, while competitiveness has more to do with “pursuing the correct strategy” towards the conservation and/or increase of the market share, operational efficiency is mainly a measure of how well the firm, sub-sector or country under study processes inputs to achieve …

Innovation for climate change adaptation and technical efficiency: an empirical analysis in the European agricultural sector

2020

This paper analyses the effect of innovation on firms' technical efficiency. Using climate-related patent data to proxy for innovation activity in different technological fields, the paper employs a stochastic frontier approach to estimate the impact of innovative efforts on agricultural firms' technical efficiency taking account of both unobservable heterogeneity and double heteroscedasticity in the inefficiency and idiosyncratic terms. Our findings confirm that innovation has a positive impact on firms' productivity (technical efficiency). While agricultural firms located in Germany and Sweden are more efficient compared to those in southern countries, all the European countries considere…