A Benchmarking Analysis of the Brazilian Airport Infrastructure An Application of the Expected Minimum Input Frontier

This paper assesses the technical efficiency (TE) of the infrastructure of sixty-three major airports in Brazil. We use the order-m approach in which airports are benchmarked against an expected minimum input frontier. Despite being a non-parametric estimator, the order-m is robust to noise in the data, outliers, and extreme values. In addition, the approach is able to rank airports successfully even in a small sample, a characteristic unusual for traditional non-parametric estimators. We find that international airports are more efficient than domestic ones. We also find evidence that order-m TE estimation of domestic and international airports must be done separately. © 2014 LSE and the University of Bath