| The economic deregulation efforts that have been taking place for several decades in many industries have been associated, in numerous benchmarking studies, with improvements in economic efficiency.;The aviation industry is no exception. Research on airlines and airports has demonstrated significant advantages in moving to a liberalized system of provision and regulation. However, airports and airlines are just two components of the aviation industry. The third component, air navigation service providers, links airports and airlines as well as dispenses air traffic control services. In this industry, economic deregulation has also been happening since the late 1980's. Many national systems have now been "commercialized" in attempts to improve their efficiency by separating them from their respective governments, but research on the impact of those institutional and regulatory reforms has been somewhat scarce. This gap in the literature is what this dissertation aims to address.;Using panel data from Europe, programmatic and econometric approaches will estimate if these institutional changes have been associated with improvements in the economic efficiency levels of this industry. Issues like the fragmentation of European airspace and the existence of spatial autocorrelation will also be addressed.;Results indicate that non-commercialized providers are associated with higher levels of economic efficiency. However surprising, these results might be affected by limitations of the dataset, which only runs for 10 years; causality tests were used but they did not help to further clarify the matter.;Estimates also show that a number of operational and physical variables also significantly impact the efficiency results, and there are indications to suggest that the great level of fragmentation of the European airspace is indeed impacting the overall efficiency of the system.;Keywords: Economic Efficiency, Air Traffic Management, Air Navigation Services, Air Navigation Service Providers, EUROCONTROL, Single European Sky, Data Envelopment Analysis, Stochastic Frontier Analysis. |
