The development of sustainable infrastructure has been identified as one of the seventeen sustainable development goals by the United Nations. Keeping the operation of infrastructure sustainable in terms of economy becomes a major challenge in developing countries. The objective of this research is to evaluate the operation efficiency of the expressway and explore the key influential factors. This research took expressway mileage as the physical output and evaluated the operation efficiency of the expressway companies based on the super-efficiency Slacks-Based Measure (SBM) model; additionally, we analyzed the influential factors on the basis of the fixed-effects regression model. The results showed the following: (1) The average value of operation efficiency of China's expressway companies from 2007 to 2017 was 0.904. In general, the operation of expressways was efficient. However, the differences in operation efficiency among the eleven expressway companies were significant, and some companies were seriously inefficient. (2) The asset-liability ratio, the scale, and the structure of property rights in the companies were shown to be the main factors affecting the operation efficiency. These results indicate that the development of innovative financing modes and optimization of the scale of each company are the key directions for infrastructure reform, which could eventually narrow the differences in operation efficiency and allow the development of sustainable infrastructure.
As a mode of green transport that can effectively alleviate urban traffic congestion and improve air quality, bus transport is highly subsidized by governments at all levels in China. Thus, measuring efficiency in the bus transport sector is particularly important. However, few reports in the literature have taken exogenous environmental factors into consideration to evaluate public transport operation efficiency. This may lead to inaccurate evaluation results. This study employs the three-stage DEA model, which can eliminate the impacts of exogenous environmental factors on public bus transport operation to gain real efficiency results. Meanwhile, to further explore how exogenous environmental factors affect bus transport operations, a tobit model is used to analyse the results. The main results of this paper reveal the following: first, exogenous environmental factors have a significant impact on the operational efficiency of bus transport. It is reasonable and necessary to select the three-stage method to eliminate environmental factors for real bus operation efficiency. Second, the fluctuations of the bus transport efficiency of 30 cities decreased during 2010–2016. The western region has the highest operation efficiency, followed by the eastern and the middle regions. Third, the economic, taxi transport, and urban rail transport have a marked impact on the operational efficiency of bus transport. This paper confirms the important influence of exogenous environmental factors on the efficiency of public transport operations. In addition, this article could help improve the efficiency of urban public transport operations and promote the attractiveness of urban public transport and the amount of green travel.
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are widely used to achieve sustainable infrastructure provision. The purpose of this research is to monitor the effects of PPPs in practice. This study calculated the operational efficiency of toll roads in Mainland China and examined the effect of the transformation from government operations to concession on their operational efficiency. The results showed that toll road operations were inefficient in terms of cost savings and that there were significant regional differences in the impact of concession on operational efficiency among three regions. Concession played a positive role in improving the operational efficiency in the eastern region; on the contrary, the influence was significantly negative in the western region. The effect on the central region was not significant. The results indicated that the efficiency advantages of concession were not given full play. The governments of economies in transition should pay more attention to the implementation environment of PPPs to make infrastructure operations more sustainable.
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