Malmquist productivity indices and plant capacity utilisation: new proposals and empirical application

The purpose of this contribution is to compute the popular Malmquist productivity index while adding a component representing plant capacity utilisation. In particular, this is-to the best of our knowledge-the first empirical application estimating both input- and output-oriented Malmquist productivity indices in conjunction with the corresponding input- and output-oriented plant capacity utilisation measures. Our empirical application focuses on a provincial data set of tourism activities in China over the period 2008-2016. The results contain the output- and input-oriented Malmquist productivity indices, some Spearman rank correlations between both, a t-test whether these indices differ from unity, and some bootstrapping analysis.

Automated summary

The purpose of this study is to compute the Malmquist productivity index and incorporate a component representing plant capacity utilization. The study is the first empirical application estimating both input- and output-oriented Malmquist productivity indices along with the corresponding input- and output-oriented plant capacity utilization measures. The empirical application focuses on tourism activities in China from 2008 to 2016, and the results include the Malmquist productivity indices, correlations between input- and output-oriented indices, a t-test, and bootstrapping analysis.