We study the economic, financial and distributional performance of the United States Postal Service subsequent to its 1971 reorganization. We investigate the economic drivers of productivity change (technical change, change in cost efficiency, and scale economies), and the distribution of the...

Development involves changes in social, economic and institutional structures. Quantifying development requires a large array of variables with different characteristics often highly correlated. A factor analysis approach using inferential decisions based on computed standard errors is proposed....

In this paper, we introduce a new class of index numbers for international price comparisons. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the new price index. We then propose a stochastic approach to the Ikle (1972) and the new system of index numbers. The advantage of the stochastic approach is...

The materials balance condition is a fundamental adding up condition, which essentially says that �what goes in must come out�. In this paper we argue that a number of the recently developed methods of incorporating pollution measures into standard productive efficiency models are...

With persistent population growth, a dwindling supply of arable land per capita, and the relatively high income elasticity of demand for food in developing countries, there is a growing need for food supply increases to originate from growth in productivity rather than expansions in inputs. In...

Various government-owned businesses provide water supply services to Australian residents. With the advent of recent competition and regulatory reforms in infrastructure industries in Australia, more and more of these businesses are now facing new types of incentive-based regulatory regimes....

The literature has concentrated on evaluating technological spillovers from trade and inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Little effort has been directed towards identifying efficiency externalities arising from international linkages. We evaluate these for a sample of 20 OECD countries...

The importance of availability of comparable real income aggregates and their components to applied economic research is highlighted by the popularity of the Penn World Tables. Any methodology designed to achieve such a task requires the combination of data from several sources. The first is...

Previous aid effectiveness studies have typically attempted to identify recipient-side conditions of aid effectiveness � such as �good policies�, political and economic stability, and �tropical effects� � using cross-country growth regressions. An obvious omission...

This paper provides up to date firm level analysis of the production technology and cost structures in the U.S. electric power generation industry. The paper applies an econometric approach into a dual restricted variable cost function within a “temporal equilibrium” framework. The...