Privatization, restructuring and its effects on performance: A comparison between German and British airports

摘要

This paper encompasses a comparative analysis of the economic and technical performance of thirteen airports from 1998 to 2005. Methods used are Partial Factor Productivity (PFP), Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) and Second Stage Tobit Regressions, which are applied to identify the characteristics of British and German airports and compare two different ownership structures: privatized and partially privatised with residual public ownership. The analysis aims to identify to what degree privatization contributes to or enhances the performance of the airports. Our results give support to the fact that the British (fully privatized) airports outperform the German ones. This paper improves the existing literature under two points of view. First it provides more detailed evidence on transnational productivity and performance comparisons of airports. Secondly, it uses a variety of methodologies to obtain consistent overall efficiency measures.