Exploring the environmental efficiency of airlines through a parallel RAM approach

Abstract

Air pollution in the aviation industry is becoming increasingly severe worldwide, along with rapid economic development. Therefore, it is significant to pay close attention to airlines worldwide. Usually, the airlines contain passenger transportation and freight transportation on the operating move. This paper proposes a parallel range adjusted measure (PRAM) to comprehensively measure and evaluate the environmental efficiency of 18 airlines from 2014 to 2019. Different from existing models, the model can handle shared inputs, shared desirable outputs, and shared undesirable outputs simultaneously. We build a shared resource decomposition procedure to perform a comparative analysis of the highest subsystem efficiency, and the sensitivity analysis proves the validity of the results. The main findings are as follows: 1. The optimal efficiency can be achieved by most of the 18 airlines when sharing resources; 2. Operating costs in the freight system should be increased to achieve optimal efficiency; 3. Asian airlines show higher efficiency than the airlines in Europe.