Airport technical efficiency: Evidence of privatised airports in Latin America

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, the main airports in Latin America have been privatised. This is the result, on the one hand, of the liberalisation of the aviation industry in almost all the countries of the region, and on the other hand, of the application of an extensive and uninterrupted programme of air public policies, currently underway. Based on this, this paper first analyse how public policies have influenced the development of airports in Latin America, generating the privatisation of the most important in the region (in a context of structural reform still in progress). Second, it studies how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the technical efficiency of the privatised airports in the region. Therefore, in this paper, the measurement of technical efficiency is carried out (using only technical variables, that is, infrastructure and aeronautical or air traffic variables) on a representative set of Latin American privatised airports, both in the pre-pandemic period (2017–19) and in the severest pandemic period (2020). The methodology used to carry out the study is data envelopment analysis (DEA). The main results of the research reveal high, and in some cases ideal, technical efficiency indices in the pre-pandemic period, and not very severe drops in technical efficiency in the pandemic period.