Performance efficiency evaluation of the Taiwan's shipping industry: An application of data envelopment analysis

This paper attempts to construct an efficient evaluation for a shipping industry with financial indicators, because sometimes non-financial indicators are difficult to obtain and are doubtful or untrustworthy. So financial indicators are an important method to evaluate performance. A financial statement is audited by CPA and it is easy to gather, so we do not doubt its trustworthiness. The main purpose of this paper is to measure the operating efficiency of a shipping industry and to highlight the status of operation performance so that managers or regulators can improve their performance. We use data envelopment analysis (DEA) to calculate the operating efficiency of 14 shipping firms in this paper. The empirical results show that performance evaluation for a shipping industry can be more comprehensive if financial ratios are considered.