Infrastructure Operation Efficiency and Influential Factors in Developing Countries: Evidence from China

The development of sustainable infrastructure has been identified as one of the seventeen sustainable development goals by the United Nations. Keeping the operation of infrastructure sustainable in terms of economy becomes a major challenge in developing countries. The objective of this research is to evaluate the operation efficiency of the expressway and explore the key influential factors. This research took expressway mileage as the physical output and evaluated the operation efficiency of the expressway companies based on the super-efficiency Slacks-Based Measure (SBM) model; additionally, we analyzed the influential factors on the basis of the fixed-effects regression model. The results showed the following: (1) The average value of operation efficiency of China's expressway companies from 2007 to 2017 was 0.904. In general, the operation of expressways was efficient. However, the differences in operation efficiency among the eleven expressway companies were significant, and some companies were seriously inefficient. (2) The asset-liability ratio, the scale, and the structure of property rights in the companies were shown to be the main factors affecting the operation efficiency. These results indicate that the development of innovative financing modes and optimization of the scale of each company are the key directions for infrastructure reform, which could eventually narrow the differences in operation efficiency and allow the development of sustainable infrastructure.