The impact of ownership and contractual practice on the technical efficiency level of the public transport operators: An international comparison

Abstract

We aim to assess the impact of ownership and contractual practices on technical efficiency in the public bus transport sector in the world. The sample is decomposed from eight Tunisian firms and thirty firms from France, Spain, Belgium, and so on for the period of [2009–2016]. The methods used for this purpose is the two-stage DEA in which we used three techniques in the second stage namely the Tobit and Truncated regressions and Bootstrap technique and the SFA via the Batesse and Coelli (1995) and True Fixed Effect techniques. The main results show that the TFE model has the greatest mean of efficiency scores with a value equal to 0.88, while the CRS version of the DEA approach has the lowest score with a value equal to 0.27. Regarding the second stage, there is a significant impact of the ownership on the technical efficiency estimates, the public mode affect negatively the efficiency with a value equal to0.24 (Truncated regression), an interpretation is similar to the cost-plus contract. Also, according to the statistical tests, we find a significant difference between the public and private firms as well as the cost-plus and fixed-price contract in terms of technical efficiency.