An empirical investigation on the efficiency, capacity and ownership of Italian airports

In this paper we study the efficiency of Italian airports applying a DEA model to 34 airports. We find that large airports are more efficient than domestic and regional ones, i.e. small airports have spare capacity since they are more distant from the frontier than large airports. The Tobit regression on the estimated DEA scores shows that efficiency is positively related with the hub premium and with privatization. Hence we suggest that privatization, incentives to invest in large airports (close to saturation) and development plans to improve the small airports may form the benchmarks of Italian short – run air transportation policy.