مقاله سال ۲۰۱۷

In recent years we have seen continued widespread privatisation of state-owned organisations across the world. Portugal has not been alien to this tendency and has witnessed several privatisation initiatives in different industries, such as banking, telecommunications, energy, postal services and hotels. However, the impact of these initiatives on firms’ performance remains to be fully understood.

Investigating the impact of privatisation on performance is relevant because it is proposed that, if certain conditions are met, privatisation triggers change in the organisation, leading to improved performance (Boycko, Shleifer & Vishny, 1996; Cuervo & Villalonga, 2000).

When one is interested in studying the aggregate level of performance of an organisation or of a group of organisations, one may calculate its level of productivity and its level of production efficiency (Cooper, Seiford & Tone, 2000). Productivity and production efficiency are related concepts, but have different meanings. Total factor productivity is a ratio of the weighted sum of outputs to the weighted sum of inputs (Cooper, Seiford & Tone, 2000). Production efficiency is a measure of the distance to the best practice production frontier, given the current level of technology (Cooper, Seiford & Tone, 2000). When we want to evaluate total factor productivity change, we need an index that accounts for two effects: the efficiency change effect and the frontier shift effect (Tone, 2004).