The approach to frontier estimation proposed by Farrell (1957) was not given much
detailed empirical attention for about two decades, until a paper by Charnes, Cooper and
Rhodes (CCR) in 1978, in which the term Data Envelopment Analysis was first used. Since
then there has been a large number of papers which have applied and extended the
methodology1
. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a mathematical programming approach
for the construction of production frontiers and the measurement of efficiency relative to the
constructed frontiers