567 research outputs found
Evaluating the Technical Efficiency of Hospitals in Southeastern Nigeria
Efficient utilization of health resources is a critical requirement for attaining health system goals particularly in low income countries. Inefficiency in health resource utilization may imply death for the next child in the queue in a resource constrained environment. This study analyzes the technical and scale efficiencies in hospitals in low income countries using Nigeria as a case study. The study uses primary data sample of 200 hospitals to estimate technical and scale efficiencies using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The results clearly indicate large variation in the efficiency of hospitals with average efficiency score of about 59% under the constant returns to scale assumption and about 72% under variable returns to scale. This raises some concerns about the level of technical and scale efficiencies in utilization of scarce health resources in the hospital sector particularly in low income countries
Assesing advertising efficiency : does the internet play a role?
This research focuses on a major concern for marketers addressing the claims of inefficiency of the spending on advertising. We examine whether the Internet can help increase overall advertising efficiency. Using a sample from the Spanish automobile industry, we combine a nonparametric method - Data Envelopment Analysis - with recent important insights from statistics and econometrics studies, and we find that online advertising improves the efficiency levels and this effect is more pronounced in the long-term temporal framework
âHigh Spending, Poor Productivity Gains!â Assessing Public Health System (In)Efficiency and Hospital Performance In The State Of Kuwait: Would More Private Delivery Improve Healthcare?
The healthcare sector in the State of Kuwait has been nurtured for many decades by the government, where the majority of health services in the country are controlled by the Ministry of Health (MoH). Although healthcare services in public sector hospitals are at highly subsidized rates, causing private sector involvement in healthcare to be considerably low, the growing demands for private delivery of care burgeoned participation of private hospitals in Kuwait, and improving hospital efficiency and productivity is more critical and timelier than ever. This dissertation aims to analyze public health system efficiency and hospital performance in the State of Kuwait using data envelopment analysis (DEA) techniques; where we begin by evaluating the input-oriented technical efficiency (TE) of MoH hospitals in 2015-2019 and identifying potential areas for efficiency improvement by exploring influencing institutional and environmental factors. We further conduct an output-oriented comparative study of public-private productivity in view of ownership, hospital management, and other external variables to understand drivers of productive efficiency and potential factors of output maximization disparities in 2019/2020
Bank performance, efficiency and ownership in transitition countries
Using data from 1996 to 2000, we investigate the effects of ownership, especially by a strategic foreign owner, on bank efficiency for eleven transition countries in an unbalanced panel consisting of 225 banks and 856 observations. Applying stochastic frontier estimation procedures, we compute profit and cost efficiency scores taking account of both time and country effects directly. In second-stage regressions, we take these efficiency measures along with return on assets as dependent variables with dummy variables for ownership type, a variable controlling for bank size, and dummy variables for year and country effects as explanatory variables. Methodologically, our results demonstrate the importance of including fixed effects, especially country effects, and also suggest a preference for efficiency measures over financial measures of bank performance in empirical work on transition countries. With respect to the impact of ownership, we conclude that privatization by itself is not sufficient to increase bank efficiency as government-owned banks are not appreciably less efficient than domestic private banks. Our results do support the hypothesis that foreign ownership leads to more efficient banks in transition countries. We find that foreign-owned banks are more cost-efficient than other banks and that they also provide better service, in particular if they have a strategic foreign owner. Moreover, the participation of international institutional investors is shown to have a considerable additional positive impact on profit efficiency, which is consistent with the notion that these investors facilitate the transfer of technology and know how to newly privatized banks. In addition, we find that the remaining government-owned banks are less efficient in providing services, which is consistent with the hypothesis that the better banks were privatized first in transition countries. Finally, efficiency declines with bank size, which could call into question government-orchestrated bank consolidation strategies. We conjecture that the presence of many small and efficient foreign greenfield operations in these transition countries may be responsible for this result.
Environmental performance and shadow value of polluting on Swiss dairy farms
Better understanding the trade-offs/synergies between desirable and environmentally harmful
(undesirable) farm outputs is relevant for future targeting and tailoring of agri-environmental
policy measures. We use a hyperbolic distance function to represent the production technology
employed by Swiss dairy farms in mountainous regions, thus allowing for simultaneous expansion
of desirable outputs (milk and non-milk) and contraction of undesirable output (nitrogen surplus).
We calculate the farm-specific shadow price of the undesirable output. The obtained shadow prices
(mean value with respect to milk output was equal to 28 Swiss francs per kg of nitrogen) provide
quantitative information on farmersâ costs of reducing nitrogen pollution
Bibliometric overview and retrospective analysis of fund performance research between 1966 and 2019
Fund performance has been a hot topic in the financial research
area, fair and correct evaluation of fund performance is of great
significance for fund investors and companies. However, most of
the relevant publications do not have any retrospective analysis
of this topic in terms of knowledge domain to show its development
trends and research concerns. To address this issue, two
effective bibliometric tools namely Citespace II (The 5.3.R4
Edition) and SciMat are used to analyze the knowledge domain of
this field in this paper. We have analyzed 979 articles related to
fund performance from Web of Science between 1966 and 2019
(July), the analysis content includes the current status, collaboration
network, co-citation network, and emerging trends of fund
performance research, then we have derived the following
desired conclusions: (1) In the last twenty years, there was a significant
increase in the publication and citation numbers of fund
performance research; especially, the relative research has
become interdisciplinary and internationalized. (2) âMutual Fund
Performanceâ, âFund Returnâ, âInvestment Performanceâ, and
âPortfolio Selectionâ are the hottest topics in the fund performance
research. (3) âSmall Fundâ and âInvestor Reactionâ are the
two emerging trends in the fund performance research. To sum
up, there are two main contributions in this paper: First, we provide
a full bibliometric analysis about the fund performance
research. Second, we make the further development of fund performance
research easier and more clearly to show the directions
to learn and study for beginners
Monitoring domestic material consumption at subnational level: Enabling the territorial perspective
162 p.The growing awareness that business as usual is both, unwise and unsustainable, has placed the role of the environment and the efficient use of natural resources at the centre of political and economic strategies. At the same time, mitigation strategies and monitoring frameworks geared to sustainability are generally implemented at national or supranational levels, failing short in providing significant guidance for local policy makers. This thesis provides a methodology for scaling national environmental indicators to lower levels considering territorial heterogeneity. Hence, it provides a regional database for resource consumption that represents a critical input to expand the understanding on the complex relationship between resource consumption, territorial contexts and socioeconomic drivers. The analysis highlights the existence of a significant technological gap between urban and rural regions, the latter struggling the most to recover from economic crises and to retain human capital. Going further, a closer inspection on the impacts of socioeconomic drivers on resource efficiency across different regional economic structures reveals that increased access to capital would generate higher resource efficiency returns in material-intensive economies, compared with service-based economies. Differently, increased agglomeration levels represent the best resource efficiency leverage across urban territories.Overall, the thesis brings into discussion a renewed interest for the consideration of territorial aspects for a better understanding of the dialectics between the underlying forces driving regional resource efficiency and the different opportunities and challenges that regions might face according to their specific endowments
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