Towards realizing best-in-class civil aviation strategy scenarios

Developed and less developed countries follow different approaches during the formulation of aviation strategic plans. Additionally, there exists no pre-defined framework to guide developing countries in formulating civil aviation strategies matching their macro-environment and competitiveness levels while addressing their future vision for growth or sustainability. Instead, civil aviation planning over-look these priorities and is often dictated by local political pressures, and mostly influenced by uncoordinated foreign aid assistance. Hence, developing countries use dissimilar and un-structured approaches to reach what is known as “civil aviation master plan” or “draft civil aviation policy”. Recognizing that a problem exists in the mechanism for civil aviation planning in this part of the world, research is encouraged to highlight this substantial topic. This paper uses a scenario-based approach to study the roles played by the macro-environment and industry-level performance in realizing best-fit national civil aviation strategies. The goals are achieved through utilizing a two-stage performance benchmarking technique named Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) on country level data on a sample of 52 countries in different stages of development, followed by truncated regression. Results of the best performing countries—in terms of output efficiency, indicate that the country's macro-environment and air transport sector's performance serve as guidelines to identify aviation policy elements that are considered to impact efficiency. The regression results indicate that a more liberal air services approach is said to be of positive influence on efficiency levels. Further, we show that private airports are more efficient, while public airports are even less efficient than those with mixed ownership/management model. Hence, policy makers are encouraged to adopt an efficient peer analysis approach based on influential policy elements to bridge performance gaps, achieve better operating capacity, direct and prioritize investments in the civil aviation sector.