Dissertation submitted for obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, at the University of Warwich

Paratransit service operators in Canada are under increasing pressure to improve the operational productivity of their services due to increased demand and tightening financial constraints. To achieve this, Paratransit operators need to know their performance as compared to peer systems and the best practices within the industry. This will enable each operator to identify where and how much improvement should be made in order to be on a par with the industry?s best practices. Little research effort, however, has been devoted to the issue of how to measure and compare paratransit efficiency in a consistent and systematic manner. <br /><br /> This research focuses on evaluating the level of efficiency of individual paratransit systems in Canada with the specific objective of identifying the most efficient service agencies and the sources of their efficiency. By identifying the most efficient systems along with the influencing factors, it is possible that new service policies and management and operational strategies could be developed for improved resource utilization and quality of services. To achieve this objective, this research applies the analysis methodology called Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach which is a mathematical programming based technique for determining the efficiency of individual systems as compared their peers involving multiple performance measures. Annual operating data from Canadian Urban Transit Association for Canadian paratransit systems of year 2001, 2002 and 2003 are used in this analysis. Regression analysis is performed to identify the possible relationship between the efficiency of a paratransit system and some measurable operating, managerial and other factors which could have an impact on the performance of paratransit systems. The regression analysis also allows for the calculation of confidence intervals and bias for the efficiency scores in order to assess their precision.

In recent years, domestic high education institutions encounter the difficulty of decrease in numbers of enrolling students and increase in number of schools, which is resulted from the trend of less newborn children and more loosing governmental policy by Ministry of Education. In such environments, the private schools encounter high pressure of seeking sufficient enrolling students and more competition among schools. Therefore, management of private schools should focus on increasing efficiency of operating organization so private schools can be developed with more competition in the future. How to operate and allocate available resources and to achieve educational goals become the most important topics for school management. Schools are Non-Profit Organization and this thesis is intended to evaluate the relative efficiency of faculties of colleges or universities with Data Envelopment Analysis¡]DEA¡^, which is popular methods for researches regarding Non-Profit Organization. It includes the CCR model and BCC model and selects 4 input items and 3 output items as evaluation indicators. The thesis employed the DEA model in the case study to evaluate the Overall Efficiency, Pure Technical Efficiency and Scale Efficiency of school faculties and performed slack variable analysis to inefficient faculties to obtain inefficiency reasons and provide further improvements. The case study in this thesis was performed with efficiency evaluation on 19 faculties of certain medical university based on the information of fiscal year of 2008. The results were as below: 1.Overall Efficiency: In the case study, 7 faculties are relatively inefficient, representing 37% of population. This means that over 1/3 of total population is inefficient. 2.Pure Technical Efficiency: In the case study, 3 faculties have no pure technical efficiency, representing 16% of population. The negative result is less than overall efficiency, which implies that the inefficiency may be caused by scale inefficiency. 3.Scale Efficiency: In the case study, 7 faculties have no scale efficiency, representing 37% of population. Such faculties need to adjust their scales to reach the overall efficiency. This thesis also provided the improvement suggestions for inefficient faculties and operation strategies for management.

This dissertation consists of four essays which investigate efficiency analysis, especially when non-discretionary inputs exist. A new approach of the multi-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for non-discretionary inputs, statistical inference discussions, and applications are provided. In the first essay, I propose a multi-stage DEA model to address the non-discretionary input issue, and provide a simulation analysis that illustrates the implementation and potential advantages of the new approach relative to the leading existing multi-stage models of non-discretionary inputs, such as Ruggiero's 1998 model and Fried, Lovell, Schmidt, and Yaisawarng's 2002 model. Furthermore, the simulation results also suggest that the constant returns to scale assumption seems to be preferred when observations have similar sizes, but variable returns to scale may be more appropriate when their scales are different. In the second essay, I make comments on Simar and Wilson work of 2007. My simulation evidence shows that traditional statistical inference does not underperform the bootstrap process proposed by Simar and Wilson. Moreover, my results also show that the truncated model recommended by Simar and Wilson does not outperform the tobit model in terms of statistical inference. Therefore, the traditional method, t-test, and the tobit model should continue to be considered applicable tools for a multi-stage DEA model with non-discretionary inputs, despite contrary claims by Simar and Wilson. The third essay raises an example of applying my new approach to data from Texas school districts. The results suggest that a lagged variable (e.g. students' performance in the previous year), a variable which has been used in the literature, may not play an important role in determining efficiency scores. This implies that one may not need access to panel data on individual scores to study school efficiency. My final essay applies a standard DEA model and the Malmquist productivity index to commercial banks in Thailand in order to compare their efficiency and productivity before and after Thailand?s Financial Sector Master Plan (FSMP) that was implemented in 2004.

Due to the prosperity of industry and business in these days, the population density is getting higher and higher. At the meantime of high development pursuit, life quality, ecology balance, health, and the environment for the descendants are as well affected. With the rise of environmental protection consciousness, the hope to defend individual rights and protect living surrounding is more highly emphasized. Because of the lack of pertinent access, people go out protesting their rights which has caused disorder and chaos in our society. It has had negative impacts on no matter environmental protection, economic development, governmental authority, and image of ¡§serving.¡¨ It is the most important principle of the environmental protection bureau to base on citizens¡¦ opinions towards environment while handing down a policy. The performance evaluation at present stage, therefore, is actually a chief reference for ongoing policy making and efficiency improving. The presently used method of efficiency evaluation has long been questioned and challenged; for example, the prudence and objectiveness of evaluation, fairness and justice of the contrived evaluating mode, economy of the evaluating process, lack of constructive advises to inefficient evaluated departments, and so on. In that case, the study manages to adopt a more objective method, Data Environment Analysis, and to evaluate and discuss the performance and main causes of efficiency differences aiming at the environmental protection bureaus in every county. With the purpose of making the outcome more objective, the study makes use of in-depth interview, Pearson Correlation, and input-output combination analysis to determine the evaluating criteria. Other than setting up the standard, the researcher furthermore conducts an empirical study by integrating DEA and regression analysis. Through the utilization of regression analysis can let on whether exogenous variables have obvious effects on the efficiency score. Lastly, this research managed to calculate the overall efficiency score gained from the DEA application from 1999 to 2001. The aim is also to find out the satisfaction with how the Environmental Protection Administration Executive Yuan has dealed with grievance statements for the past three years. The purpose is to discover the relationship between the overall efficiency score and the satisfaction degree. Via the study, findings of more relevant issues are expected and also the researcher hopes to provide the decision-making authority reference to make improvements for future measures.

The topic of Regional Innovation System (RIS) is gradually emphasized. The RIS includes four compositions. They are local government, industry, university and public research organization. The RIS results in industry cluster and provides economic development in regions such as known Silicon Valley. Thus, many countries have begun to develop RIS. In recent days, Mainland China has put emphasis on regional technology development. The experience of regional innovation in Mainland China may provide a suggestion for Taiwan. However, how to evaluate regional innovation performance is attractive. The performance of RIS in Mainland China is examined in the context of a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model. The model is tested using data from a sample of 31 cities in Mainland China. This study will provide some important innovation suggestions for regional innovation activities.

none

ABSTRACT After the national universities in Taiwan implementing the college affairs funds, the expenditure comes from not only the government supply but also universities themselves. It¡¦s for the purpose of their needs on teaching, researching, and serving. In order to enhance the elasticity that the funds use independently and the competitiveness of higher education, it is bound to put more focus on both the managing and cost efficiency. This research adopts the efficiency-measuring mode of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to weigh the conditions of managing results and efficiency fluctuations¡]the fluctuation of Malmquist productivity¡^of 51 national universities in Taiwan from year 2001 to 2004. The conclusion of obtaining is as follows: From the aspect of managing efficiency, National Chiao Tung University and National Dong Hwa University perform the best among the general universities; as for the technological universities and vocational colleges, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology and National Chin-Yi Institute of Technology perform the best. The lacks of valid managements in resource usages causes the technical inefficiencies; the general universities performed like the technological and vocational colleges were rather similar and relatively inefficient from the year 2001 to 2004. The reasons of inefficiency came from the technological efficiency of bad management with reached the scale efficiency of the best scale at the same time. The Malmquist indices of National Tsing Hua University and National Taichung University were more than 1 from the year 2001 to 2004; as for the technological and vocational colleges, the Malmquist indices of National Tai-Chung Institute of Technology, National Taichung Nursing College, National Taiwan Junior College of Performing Arts, and National Tainan Institute of Nursing were more than 1 as well. There is a decline trend gradually of productivity in 2001-2004 in both the general universities and technological and vocational colleges, it was mainly that the production technology efficiency retrogresses. Finally, implementing college affair funds may be still affected by other external objective environments, the one of great impact among them: external parameters, such as size of the school, the history of the school, and the location of the school. Through the regression analysis, there are strong correlation between campus size and management efficiency for the general universities; however, not between history and location of the school. On the other hand, the technological and vocational colleges, do not have dominance to whole efficiency value. From the analysis, we can understand the over-all performing, efficiency of the universities in Taiwan. The fund governors should manage and advent different efficiencies with various methods in order to promote the managing efficiency of the whole. KEY WORDS¡GCollege affair funds Efficient evaluation Data envelopment analysis Malmquist index.

None

In the past few years, the prominent achievement of economy in Taiwan has been called the ¡§ Taiwan Experience¡¨ or ¡§The Miracle of Economy¡¨. Urban is not only the place that people gather to take economic activities and live in groups, but also the area that produce and consume goods. Now the modern economy has expanded as the type of urban economic. Nowadays, service industry which has been the major industry during the transition of industrial structure in Taiwan could be an illustration that Taiwan is in the age of Service Economy, the functions of a city are going to be more various and delicate, and the division of industry is tending to be more professional. Though the service industry that just serves customers in the past can¡¦t totally meet the needs of the public, the growth of its high specialization and output value bridges the gap for the problems resulted from the manufacturing industry. Most important, the producer service industry has become the main industry in the world. The purpose of this research is to understand the development in the present and tendency of producer service industry, and also to measure the space efficiency of producer service industry in 22 counties for three years by Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA). The research is divided into five parts: the first part includes research structure and literature review. The second part is to discuss and figure out the theory of DEA. The third part is to analyze the transition and development of producer service in present days. In the fourth part of the research measures the efficiency of producer service industry in 22 counties, in the mean time it estimates the relation of among efficiency, agglomerate economy, city scale, public investment, and the development of other industries by regression analysis and chi-square test. Then the conclusions and recommendations would be discussed to government that makes the plans of economy industry policy and the development of producer service industry. The conclusions of this research are: 1.The producer service industry in Taiwan grows rapidly, and the industry gathers in Taipei city which Location Quotient is more than one . In addition, Taipei city plays the most role for industry¡¦s output value, the numbers of employees and factories Moreover, the producer service industry in Taipei Metropolitan Area and other Metropolitan city gradually grows. Furthermore, the industry is expanding to the nearby metropolitan gradually. 2.The producer service industry and the industries in the producer service industry are influenced by Forward Linkage Effect. This shows that the industry grows rapidly following other industries development during the development of economy. 3.The producer service industry in Taipei city shows the excellent space efficiency. On the other hand, the some of 22 cities areas showed efficiency from 1986 to 1991, and the nearby metropolitan area also showed efficiency in 1996, especially in Taipei metropolitan area and in Kaohsiung metropolitan area. 4.The space efficiency of producer service industry shows remarkable relation with city scale, agglomerate economy and public investment. Additionally, the producer service industry also has the close relation with manufacturing industry and non-producer service industry during the development of industry.