An analysis of the performance of public bus transport in Tunisian cities

• Analysing the cost efficiency of the Tunisian public bus transport.
• The regional transport companies (RTC) are economically inefficient.
• Battese and Coelli (1992) is chosen as the most robust model for this estimate.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the efficiency cost of the Tunisian public bus transport system using six stochastic frontier models to see which one would the most robust. This analysis is based on a sample of 12 Tunisian regional bus transport companies for the period 2000/2010. To achieve this, we chose, as an dependent variable, the “variable cost” and, as an independent variable, the output “seats per kilometer”, the prices of the input, labor and energy as well as a control variable represented by the network length. The main results show that the regional bus transport companies are economically inefficient with an almost similar magnitude regardless of the estimated model except for Green’s True model (2002). This inefficiency is explained by the existence of an outdated regulation characterized by an administered wage policy where financial risk is incurred by the authorities and not by the company.