Abstract - In the
last years air transport industry underwent a strong deregulation
trend worldwide. Particular attention was put by US as well as EU
policy makers to develop higher competition between potential
suppliers of ground handling services. Hence, it is taking growing
relevance the decision by airports’ managers at any airport size to
fully or partially out/in-source handling operations. Furthermore,
commercial business is becoming increasingly interesting in light of
revenues diversification opportunity. Using a stochastic input
distance function approach we develop a model to test whether
economies or diseconomies of scope among outputs occur as well as to
evaluate the technical and scale efficiency conditions on a sample on
Italian small and medium airports. Scope diseconomies connected to
operational size are found between airside aeronautical and handling
activities. On the contrary, scope economies occur anywhere between
aeronautical and commercial operations. This paper improves the
existing literature under two points of view. First it provides
evidence on the highly debated theme of outsourcing and
diversification opportunities for airports. Secondly, it uses a
methodology which allows to get estimates without incurring in the
a-priori assumption of overall cost-minimisation behaviour. |