تعیین معیار ژاپنی فرودگاه با روش بهره وری عوامل کل درون زا و وزن DEA(تحلیل پوششی داده ها) : آزمایش انتقاد از سرمایه گذاری بیش از حد در فرودگاه منطقه ای ژاپنی

As aviation demand increased constantly along with the rapid economic growth in Japan and surrounding East Asian countries over the last several decades, Japanese government promoted airport construction since 1950s. However, the recent change in the economic background has made rise to a criticism toward the inefficient public investment, especially the transportation infrastructure. In this criticism, it has been argued that some of the small regional airports are indeed suffering the issue of overinvestment. Thus this paper attempts to verify the validity of such criticism by statistically measuring the efficiency of Japanese airports and conducting comparative analysis. For this objective, the paper employs two distinct methods namely data-envelopment analysis and endogenous-weight TFP methods. The results from these methods consistently indicates that the efficiency of regional airports in mainland Japan are lower than others, and that those airports constructed in the 1990s are relatively inefficient.

Many airports have been constructed and expanded in Japan along with the economic development since the 1950s. These Japanese airports are divided basically into four categories: the first-category airports mainly for international airlines, the second-category airports mainly for domestic airlines, the third-category airports for regional airline transportation, and the other airports.1 There were a total of 57 airports in 1970: 2 in the first category, 17 in the second category, 28 in the third-category, and the remaining 10 were others. In the year 2000, there were 94 airports (4, 25, 51, and 14 airports in the respective categories). This increase of airports can be partly explained by the increase of the aviation demand in Japan. However, in recent years government’s policy of constructing airports has been criticized for over investment.

This paper has applied the DEA and the EW-TFP methods in measuring the efficiency of Japanese airports, and examined whether the current criticisms about the inefficiency of small regional airports in Japan are indeed valid or not. The paper has used a data set which contains 67 observations including most of international airports and small regional airports. Each observation consists of four inputs (runway length, terminal size, access cost, and labor) and three outputs (passenger volume, cargo handling, and aircraft movements). Though this data set does not contain financial data due to data collection difficulty, we were able to obtain the “physical” efficiency, especially focusing on the issue of over investment.