Background: Optimizing efficiency has become increasingly critical with the growing demand for finite healthcare resources driven by population growth and an ageing society. Hence, policymakers are urgently finding more efficient ways to deliver health services. Thalassemia is a complex...

Background: Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) is a global priority and a keystone element of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. However, COVID-19 is causing serious impacts on tax revenue and many countries are facing constraints to new investment in health. To advance UHC progress,...

Purpose - This paper investigates the development of efficiency and the progress of banking integration in the European Union by checking for convergence among banks of European and Eurozone countries as well as contrasting the results with those of United States banks....

Inefficiency is common in many of the world's water utilities, especially in developing countries. The problem derives from a range of different causes relating primarily to technical, organizational, and commercial (TOC) factors. Evidence from a World Bank study conducted in 2020 shows that...

The chemical fertilizer industry has made great contributions to China's food security. Existing studies mainly focus on evaluating fertilizer use efficiency at the farm level whereas little is known about the technical efficiency of Chinese firms producing fertilizer. Based on the Chinese...

We use nonparametric methods to compute the environmental inefficiency of 100 countries over the period 1990-2017 on the macro-level. The inefficiency is expressed as the potential reduction of GHG emissions, holding economic output constant. Based on that, we estimate different trend functions...

This paper analyses the gold sector's environmentally-adjusted (carbon dioxide – CO 2 emissions) efficiency using cross-sectional global mine-level data from 2019. We use a meta-frontier approach to compute mine level efficiency under different technologies and environments (e.g., open pit vs....

In this paper we concern with the decomposition and aggregation of cost efficiencies when input prices vary across decision-making units. In this respect, we first examine the relations among the components of the existing decompositions as well as with other efficiency measures. We also derive...