تاثیر متغیرهای محیطی در بهره وری چینی ها و دیگر خطوط هوایی غیر چینی

This paper explores the impact of an international focus, the proportion of cargo traffic, and the level of salaries on the operational efficiency of Chinese airlines and other non-Chinese airlines. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is employed to evaluate the operational efficiency and a bootstrapped truncated regression is applied to explore the impact of environmental variables on efficiency. The results show that an international focus has a negative impact, while the level of salaries has a positive impact. Also, we demonstrate that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between efficiency and the proportion of cargo traffic

In previous research, Fethi et al. (2000) argued that an international focus might expose airlines to spatial disparities. Scheraga (2004) also discussed how a higher involvement in international operations might induce lower operational efficiencies due to cabotage and establishment rights. Divergence across geographic regions with regard to competition law, policies in air transport and airport infrastructure constraints could potentially affect the operational performance of international airlines. However in recent years, the world air transport industry has been going through a gradual period of liberalization and so protectionism within the industry has weakened. We therefore hypothesize that the effect of international business on efficiency may have become positive. For example Singapore Airlines, with a strong international focus, is widely regarded as one of the most efficient airlines. Moreover each year China exports large quantities of products to North American and Europe, as well as having a need for a large domestic cargo transport network. This provides Chinese airlines with an opportunity to develop their air cargo business. So for Chinese airlines offering both passenger and cargo services, this raises the questions as to whether increasing their share of cargo traffic (the cargo business ratio) could improve their operational efficiency. Scheraga (2004) and Hong and Zhang (2010) suggested that raising this ratio would be beneficial. On the one hand, the cargo business requires less input and more flexible transportation conditions than passenger services. Combining passenger services with cargo services may result in higher load factors for the belly compartment of passenger aircraft. On the other hand, cargo flows are much more unbalanced than passenger flows (cargo is usually carried one-way, while passengers usually make a round trip) and thus the cargo business may result in lower load factors and poorer efficiency. So the cargo business can potentially affect load factors in either way but Scheraga (2004) and Hong and Zhang (2010) only discussed the positive impact. We hypothesize that there might exist an inverted U-shaped relationship between operational efficiency and the cargo business ratio. When the actual ratio is lower than the optimal ratio, raising the cargo ratio may be beneficial. When the actual ratio is higher than the optimal ratio, raising the ratio may not. Another competitive advantage of China is the abundant labor resource. Due to the huge population and the current stage of industrialization, the salaries of employees in China are much lower than in many other countries in the world, which can potentially affect Chinese airlines' operational efficiency in either way. On the one hand, lower salaries may help companies to cut their operational costs and improve their profitability, while on the other hand, lower staff costs may induce less attention to human resource management, which may lead to lower average employee productivity. Different labor employment strategies can be applied, depending on whether lower salaries improve the operational efficiency. If this is the case, then Chinese airlines would need to continue with their high labor intensive operations. If it is not, then changes may be needed. To our best knowledge, the effect of salaries on operating efficiency has not been investigated within the airline industry context, although the impact on profitability has been discussed. The remaining of this paper is organized as follows. Following this introduction, Section 2 presents the methodology. Section 3 describes the data. The results are presented and discussed in Section 4 and finally Section 5 concludes.

From our research, we conclude that lower salary levels reduce operational efficiency (although they may improve profitability). Moreover we conclude that an international focus has a negative impact on efficiency due to spatial disparities. We consider that the most important contribution of our research is that we confirm that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between operational efficiency and a cargo focus. As a result, in some cases a higher cargo business ratio might worsen efficiency.