ANALYSING AIRPORT EFFICIENCY IN EAST CHINA USING A THREE-STAGE DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS

This paper evaluates the Technical Efficiencies (TEs) of a group of airports in East China by applying a threestage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method. The merit of this method allows us to consider the impact of the environmental factors on measuring airport efficiencies. Three variables, i.e. per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the proportion of the tertiary industry, and the number of tourists, are used to represent the environmental factors. The results show that the environmental factors have airport-specific impacts on the value of the efficiencies. Additionally, airport TE are dominated by both Pure Technical Efficiency (PTE) and Scale Efficiency (SE). Based on empirical results, airport specific strategies can be provided to enhance airport efficiency, such as taking the effects of environmental variables and the statistical noise into consideration when analysing the airport efficiency, improving airport efficiencies according to their own conditions and improving the PTE or SE according to their categorizations.