This article proposes a trade restrictiveness quantity index (TRQI) to measure the welfare impact of trade restrictions based on a distance functions approach. The TRQI embodies two Farrell measures of efficiency - respectively for producers and consumers - that can be computed using standard...

Inequalities created by relating gauge (distance) functions and their dual support functions have been used in economics and operations research/management science to measure efficiency and productivity. The most familiar example is the Farrell (1957) measure of cost efficiency and its...

A Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index is employed to account for both marketed output and the output of pollution abatement activities of U.S. state manufacturing sectors for 1974-1986. The index allows us to decompose the change in productivity into measures of change in efficiency and...

We review nonparametric estimation of efficiency and productivity, by which we mainly mean activity analysis, or data envelopment analysis (DEA). The review covers topics that we hope will be of special interest to those doing research in the realm of agriculture. We also include a brief...

The directional output distance function is used to measure the efficiency of 209 electric utilities in 1993 and 1997. Exploiting duality conditions, the directional output distance function is used to estimate the shadow price of sulfur dioxide and the Morishima elasticity of output substitution

Economists have long studied the efficiency of firms, industries, and entire economies. This volume brings together leading scholars to make connections between efficiency and a number of diverse areas of current interest to economists, including an examination of the efficiency of tax systems...