DATE MARKETING EFFICIENCY ESTIMATION IN SAUDI ARABIA: A TWO-STAGE DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS APPROACH

A two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach was applied to explore the relationship between date marketing efficienciesin Saudi Arabia and estimates of technical and cost efficiencies. Special reference was made to the objectives of date marketing traders: namely, increasing the scale and margins of date marketing and achieving the highest ratio of date marketing margin to date marketing cost, thereby enabling the impact of improved date marketing efficiency to be estimated. In addition, the research paper analyses the determinants of technical and cost efficiencies in an econometric framework using a TOBIT model to assess the impacts of the determinants on date marketing traders in Saudi Arabia. The results showed that Saudi Arabia has great potential to improve its date marketing efficiency and to achieve an additional 51% of added value annually, increasing from a current figure of about US$2.67 billion per year to about US$4.01 billion per year with improved economic efficiency. The results also showed that developing date marketing in Saudi Arabia needs policies which relate the traditional concept of market efficiency to the technical and cost efficiencies of date marketing. Such policies would help to establish the programmes and tools which are needed to achieve marketing goals.