The impact of environmental variables on the efficiency of Chinese and other non-Chinese airlines

•International focus has negative impact on operational efficiency.•Level of salaries has positive impact on operational efficiency.•There is an inverted U-shaped relationship between efficiency and cargo business.

This paper explores the impact of an international focus, the proportion of cargo traffic, and the level of salaries on the operational efficiency of Chinese airlines and other non-Chinese airlines. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is employed to evaluate the operational efficiency and a bootstrapped truncated regression is applied to explore the impact of environmental variables on efficiency. The results show that an international focus has a negative impact, while the level of salaries has a positive impact. Also, we demonstrate that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between efficiency and the proportion of cargo traffic.