Political opportunists and mavericks?: a typology of Spanish airports

Abstract

Given the importance of airport industry as an important enabler to ensuring cities have ready access to fully competitive international air services, the authors propose a framework for investigating the economic efficiency of Spanish airports. The literature on airports' efficiency and different methodologies to measure it, are reviewed with the aim of gaining useful insights for the proposal of airports' typology. The scope for investigation encompasses all possible forms of airport businesses, including not only those founded on the principle of commercial viability but also those that are political opportunists or public service facilities. The resulting typology presented in this paper produces two 'ideal types' of airports: political opportunists or public service facilities and mavericks. Assessing both the research on typologies of airports through cross-efficiency methodology and one-way analysis of variance using "self" and "peered" multipliers, the authors show that mavericks present a robust economic performance, but the performance of the other group depends highly on the selection of multipliers. However, classification of mavericks is quite stable and does not depend on the selection of multipliers. Recommendations are made on how the typology can contribute to further research into ways to foster economic efficiency.