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Frontier Analysis

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Book cover An Economist’s Guide to Economic History

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Economic History ((PEHS))

Abstract

A great deal of research in economics and business is devoted to the study of the efficiency of individuals, organisations or entire economies. This chapter introduces a family of innovative techniques that help in the analysis of efficiencies by comparing inputs and outputs to estimate an efficiency frontier. A series of examples from both macroeconomic history and microeconomic history illustrate common areas of application.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Reluctance to adopting linear programming techniques, which underlie frontier analysis, mostly concerns the fact that no account is taken of noise or measurement error in the data and that it may be sensitive to outliers.

  2. 2.

    For more details on the growth decomposition, see Kumar and Russell (2002) and Timmer et al. (2016).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Pieter Woltjer

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  1. Pieter Woltjer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

    Matthias Blum

  2. Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

    Christopher L. Colvin

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Woltjer, P. (2018). Frontier Analysis. In: Blum, M., Colvin, C. (eds) An Economist’s Guide to Economic History. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96568-0_48

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96568-0_48

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96567-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96568-0

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