Technical efficiency of banking institutions in a Pacific Island Country: a distance function stochastic frontier analysis*

Abstract

This is the first study, to our knowledge, that estimates the technical efficiencies, and total factor productivity growth and its components, using a distance function stochastic frontier approach and three single-output models in Fiji, a Pacific Island Country-a region where banking efficiency literature remains scarce despite phenomenal advances in the field. This study's ability to discuss the implications of the results for individual institutions separately is a key contribution of efficiency studies relating to the region as well as to the extant literature. The study found that there is substantial scope for improvement of productivity and efficiency, especially in producing more deposits with the same level of inputs.

Benchmarking hospital safety and identifying determinants of hospital-acquired complication: the case of Queensland cardiac linkage longitudinal cohort

“…Policymakers should consider adopting the benchmarking method used in this study to evaluate hospital safety performance to target setting and budget allocation. This method has been widely applied in healthcare [ 13 ] and other industries [ 8 , [10] , [11] , [12] , 14 ] for performance benchmarking. The main advantage of our approach is that it can provide useful information such as peers (which best-practice hospitals are most relevant to learn from) and target (how much HAC and be reduced) for each hospital.…”

“…The study fills the literature gap by benchmarking the patient safety performance of hospitals and estimate the extent to which HAC rates can be reduced, after controlling for hospital characteristics. The benchmark analysis is conducted using data envelopment analysis (DEA) method, which has been widely used to analyse and rank the operational performance of institutions in various industries such as agriculture [ 8 ], fishery [ 9 ], banking [ 10 ], education [ 11 ], tourism [ 12 ], traffic safety [ 13 ], and healthcare [ 14 ]. Our DEA-based benchmarking analysis will estimate the feasible range HAC rate can be reduced.…”