Supermarkets are gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on productivity and efficiency have hardly been studied. We use a meta-frontier approach and combine this with propensity...

In this paper, we compare the efficiency of the Italian and German universities in the process of transforming public funding into the multiple outputs of a university, i.e. graduating students, publishing research, and patenting activity. We do this with a particular focus on the policies...

There are some specific features of the non-radial DEA (data envelopment analysis) models which cause some problems under the returns to scale measurement. In the scientific literature on DEA, some methods were suggested to deal with the returns to scale measurement in the non-radial DEA models....

Attempts can be found in the DEA literature to identify returns to scale at efficient interior points of the production possibility set on the basis of returns to scale at points of the corresponding reference sets. However, an opposite approach is put forward in this paper, advocating that...