Measuring European railway efficiency using DEA approach

There has been a great deal of interest in analysing deregulating and restructuring policies in the European railway sector. A large amount of studies is based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) for evaluating such policies. One of the main reasons why DEA gain so much popularity is, that it allows to measure efficiency, when production process presents the structure of multiple inputs and outputs, without knowing information about prices. On the other hand the complete freedom in choosing weights for inputs and outputs can cause overestimation of efficiency levels for some DMUs. The objective of this paper is to evaluate relevance of this fact in railway sector. For this purpose it's performed common CCR, BCC and SBM model and after a deeper insight into the results assurance region method is drawn up. Finally efficiency levels of selected models and resulting rankings of European countries are compared. Analysis is performed on the national rail system data for the year 2008 for 23 European countries using passenger and freight services as outputs and length of lines,staff, freight and passenger transport stock as inputs.