Belt and Road Initiative and Railway Sector Efficiency—Application of Networked Benchmarking Analysis
1
School of Economics & Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
2
LUT Kouvola, LUT University, Kouvola 45100, Finland
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2019, 11(7), 2070; https://doi.org/10.3390/su11072070
Received: 3 March 2019
/
Revised: 31 March 2019
/
Accepted: 2 April 2019
/
Published: 8 April 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue OBOR—One Belt One Road Research: New Forms of International and Cross-Industry Collaboration for Sustainable Growth and Development)
In recent years, there has been a lot of attention paid to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which aims to invest in better connecting China, South-East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe. As countries that share the same continent, and are in many cases without proper sea connection (landlocked), the key mode of long-distance transportation is railways. However, numerous countries have different levels of past investments, labor productivity, transportation profile, and culture surrounding railways, and all of this leads to differences in overall efficiency. In this research, we apply well established and widely used data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the longitudinal efficiency of railway operations. This is the first time such an analysis is completed on the Belt and Road member countries. Efficiency itself hardly improved at all during the examination period, whether in passenger and freight or just freight transports. China itself represents an important benchmark for many countries, as its efficiency is all the time highest possible. In the network benchmarking analysis, it was shown that China, Estonia, Latvia, and Israel are often proposed benchmarks for the others to increase their efficiency in the future. From efficiency development perspective, Chinese railway sector is beneficial and more balanced to be benchmarked as compared to other significantly sized railway countries, like India or Russia.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
belt and road; railways; efficiency; networks; benchmarking
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Li, W.; Hilmola, O.-P. Belt and Road Initiative and Railway Sector Efficiency—Application of Networked Benchmarking Analysis. Sustainability 2019, 11, 2070. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11072070
AMA Style
Li W, Hilmola O-P. Belt and Road Initiative and Railway Sector Efficiency—Application of Networked Benchmarking Analysis. Sustainability. 2019; 11(7):2070. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11072070
Chicago/Turabian StyleLi, Weidong, and Olli-Pekka Hilmola. 2019. "Belt and Road Initiative and Railway Sector Efficiency—Application of Networked Benchmarking Analysis" Sustainability 11, no. 7: 2070. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11072070
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
