5. Concluding comments
Corporatisation and privatisation of airports could result in a more commercial approach to management with resulting improvements in performance, but this cannot be evaluated purely on the basis of financial indicators. The need to develop appropriate service and productivity indicators has been recognised and there is a small, but growing literature on the subject. Though there have been appeals to measure ‘overall productivity’, there is little evidence that the tools of productivity measurement that have been applied in other parts of the transport sector have had serious application in the case of airports (Tretheway, 1995). This paper has pointed out the shortcomings of partial productivity measures and it has emphasised the need to distinguish between the various sources of overall productivity differences among airports.
We regard our work as exploratory and recommend that more analysis be undertaken that should as a minimum consider a time period of 10 years. Such work should seek to improve the definition of output both for produced services and consumed services and it should resolve the issue of annualised cost of capital to a single definition. Major advancements would be the estimation of a multilateral TFP index approach across time and airports and a decomposition of the resulting gross TFP index to identify the influence of economies of scale, scope and density and other contextual influences such as support facilities. The current study, though, is indicative of the potential for and desirability of more detailed investigation.