This paper analyzes productivity growth in seventeen OECD countries over the period 1979-88. A nonparametric programming method (activity analysis) is used to compute Malmquist productivity indexes. These are decomposed into two component measures, namely, technical change and efficiency change....

In this paper we focus on specification of revenue functions in their dual price space. We consider two distance functions, both dual to the revenue function: Shephard output distance function and the directional output distance function, both in price space. The former is multiplicative,...

Presents an elementary version of the Malmquist productivity change index. This index measures productivity change using data on inputs and outputs, but does not require price information.

This article provides a method of measuring performance in the public sector, specifically performance of school districts. The technique is closely related to the family of Farrell type efficiency measures as well as data envelopment analysis (DEA). It also can be viewed as a generalization of...