Chapter 37: Models of Airport Performance^†

Modellers have concentrated their attention on two main aspects of airport performance. In the early years of economic analysis of airports, attention was focused on congestion processes and costs, and the merits of different options, such as pricing, administrative controls, and investments as means of reducing these costs. There was limited interest in this type of model for some time, though lately there has been a resurgence of interest. Currently, much effort is being directed towards developing models of productive efficiency measurement. Airports have been a surprisingly late area for application of such techniques as total factor productivity, data envelopment analysis, and cost or production frontiers, which have been common in other transport and utility industries for some years (see Chapter 20). There is a small, though rapidly growing, and literature in this aspect of modelling.