A Model of Evaluating Transportation System Efficiency Based on Data Envelopment Analysis Approach

Transportation will be increasingly vital in China as the nation's economy continues to change from a planned, centralized system to one that is market-based and decentralized. In this paper, we propose a data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to evaluate transportation system efficiency (TSE) for 31 major regions (including 23 provinces, 4 municipalities and 4 autonomous regions) in China. This model is significant because it not only can provide useful information to measure TSE through an evaluation framework including 6 output variables and 9 input variables, but also can help government identify the inefficient operations. In this paper, transportation infrastructure in china is firstly introduced. Then the theory of DEA approach is overviewed. Thirdly, a new evaluation index system for TSE evaluation is set up which contains factors that reflect financial measures, capability measures, availability measures, traffic measures and turnover measures. Fourthly, an empirical study is carried out based on DEA approach to calculate TSE for 31 major regions in China. Finally, we draw some conclusions and make suggestions for future study.