Efficiancy in airport management: a two stage analysis applied to Italian airports

This work aims to analyse the financial and operating efficiency of Italian airports, by applying a non parametric frontier analysis to the airport industry. It seems interesting identify the best practices on national level in order to address any improvements to inefficient airports. It becomes even more important particularly in the current period in which there has been a privatization process of airport infrastructure in order to extract some policy considerations for increasing the efficiency of the services. The analysis was carried out on a sample of 34 Italian airports during the period 2006-2016 for which it has been collected data referred to the main input and output of the airport management companies along with financial information. The study was carried out mainly through a DEA analysis (Data Envelopment Analysis), which allows to analyse the technical efficiency and performance of each individual Italian airport and then to point out the critical points of several airport operators through the identification of any best practices applicable to the relevant field and the distance between the latter and the remaining DMUs. Following the efficiency analysis of Italian airports, this paper it was studied the effect of the cargo traffic proportion compared to total traffic. To this purpose, using a Tobit regression, it was analysed the airport size presence, low-cost carrier presence and cargo traffic on efficiency. Results obtained pointed out some interesting features of the Italian airports system especially on the effect of the overall technical, pure technical, and scale efficiency on airport efficiency. It was found not only that the dominant source of efficiency is the efficiency of scale but even that, in Italy, only a minority of airports appear inefficient from an operational point of view, which makes to conclude that overall Italians airports are well managed with regard to the pure technical efficiency. In other words, air transport privatization and deregulation can positively affect regional airport efficiency. Outcomes obtained suggest also a positive association between overall technical efficiency and airport size, LCCs presence and cargo traffic, confirming the key role of market in achieving a more sustainable and efficient airport economy.