The relationship between airport performance and privatisation policy: A nonparametric metafrontier approach

•Metafrontier approach and DEA model are applied to evaluate airport efficiency.•This gives greater discriminatory power to the results, enabling improved ranking.•The results indicate that private-own airports have the best technical efficiency performance compared with the public-one.

The assessment of economic and technical efficiency is a useful tool for selecting the most appropriate technology for airport operations. However, traditional models require that the units being assessed operate with the same technology. To overcome this limitation, one can use a non-concave metafrontier approach that is based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to calculate the techno-economic efficiency and Technological Gap Ratios (TGRs) with non-homogeneous technologies for airports across countries and with different ownerships. The previous studies mainly applied DEA to measure the operational efficiency of airports. Our results indicate that privately owned airports have better technical efficiency than public ones. In addition, our empirical analysis shows that public airports in the Asia-Pacific area have the lowest techno-economic efficiency.