بهره وری فرودگاه های برزیل: شواهد از "تحلیل پوششی داده" راه اندازی شده و تخمین های "بدنه در دسترسی آزاد"

This paper reports on the use of different approaches for measuring efficiency in 65 major Brazilian airports. Several programming based estimates were generated to allow testing for significant differences in returns-to-scale and input-decreasing/output-increasing potentials. The findings corroborate anecdotal and empirical evidences regarding a capacity shortfall within Brazilian airports, where the short-term potential for passenger/cargo consolidation per landing/takeoff is virtually nonexistent.

In the past few years, accelerated economic growth has increased the demands for airport services in Brazil. Between 2003 and 2008, the number of air passengers grew at an average rate of 10% per year (McKinsey, 2010) and, although the cargo tonnage remained relatively stable over the period, its value-added has increased significantly (IPEA, 2010). This increasing air demand for reliable services has placed enormous pressure upon the Brazilian airport infrastructure. The situation is expected to get worse, as the country hosts the Soccer Word Cup (2014) and Olympic Games (2016). This paper presents a benchmark and efficiency analysis of 65 Brazilian airports for 2009, looking at their returns to scale and at possibilities for passenger/cargo consolidation per landing/takeoff. Different approaches are used in a complementary fashion, not only for measuring the efficiency levels of the airports, but also for providing a assessment on the adequacy of the underlying convexity assumption regarding the data used; data envelopment analysis (DEA) and free disposal hull (FDH). Despite the increased use of DEA to measure the efficiency of airports, there are few studies that make use of the bootstrapping methodology to account for measurement errors in its estimates. Initially introduced by Simar and Wilson (1998), bootstrapping allow sensitivity analyses on efficiency scores, as well as on scaling indicators, to be performed by repeatedly sampling from the original data. A sample distribution of these estimates is then obtained, from which confidence intervals may be derived (Cooper et al., 2007). The paper uses the bootstrapping methodology to test, among other things, for the presence of scale inefficiency and to determine the nature of returns to scale at the Brazilian airports.

Although there is strong evidence that airports owned/managed by governments are less efficient than airports with a private ownership, it is only recently that the Brazilian government initiated a movement towards privatization. The historical lack of pressure to be more competitive and productive, altogether with insufficient investments in infrastructure, led to operational bottlenecks and capacity shortfall that may possible jeopardize the passenger flows during the upcoming World Cup and the Olympic Games. Our findings corroborate previous studies and anecdotal evidences. Not only do the vast majority of Brazilian airports enjoy increasing returns-to-scale, but also the alternatives for passenger/cargo consolidation in the short-term are severely constrained within major airports closely located to important urban centers, both in terms of population and industrial activity. Different from smaller countries (Martín and Román, 2001), where in similar situations there may exist room for a policy of reallocation of traffic from severely congested airports to smaller ones, with lower occupancy rates, Brazil's continental dimension makes additional transportation costs and times to be prohibitive.