| Summary: | In order to deal with the competitive environment surrounding the air transport industry, civil aviation authorities have undertaken several approaches to improve airport efficiency, such as investing in the infrastructure and privatising airport ownership or governance. Among these methods, airport privatisation policy has been implemented for around 25 years in the U.K., closely followed by other European countries. By contrast, decision makers elsewhere, such as in the Asia-Pacific region, are now interested in privatisation and in doing so evaluate the impact of this process elsewhere. Focussing on the most popular method for assessing airport efficiency, with Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) a unit can appear efficient simply because of its pattern of inputs and outputs rather than any inherent efficiency. But only using DEA may not provide useful results about the efficiency of airports as different decision makers may weight the relative importance of inputs and outputs differently (for example, airport managers, and airline companies). In this research, another aim is to develop and demonstrate the applicability of different analysis techniques within the AEES. For this reason, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) analysis is adopted to calculate the importance of each variable. These results are then integrated into both DEA and DEA, Assurance Region (AR) models, to reflect the different importance of the metrics. In the context of air transportation, an integrated AHP/DEA and AHP/DEA-AR model are applied for the first time to evaluate airport efficiency. A sensitivity analysis with different variable sets is carried out. In conclusion, an AEES is established and the result shows that the approach by adopting AHP/DEA-AR model in particular can provide more accurate values of relative efficiency than using the traditional DEA approach. There are also different priorities between stakeholder groups and these can affect the efficiency scores of airports. However, the results for each of the different analysis techniques show that there is no statistically significant relationship between airport ownership and efficiency. Therefore, the primary aim of this research is to examine the relationship between airport privatisation and efficiency, through an Airport Efficiency Evaluation System (AEES). The study covers Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, reflecting different attitudes towards the role of government within airport management. Focussing on the most popular method for assessing airport efficiency, with
|
|---|
