Introduction to APPC-2018, a Special Issue of the Journal of Productivity Analysis, “Novel Applications of Efficiency and Productivity Analyses in the Asia-Pacific Region”

In this study, an appropriate nonparametric two-step approach to conditional efficiencies is used to investigate how size and time affect the performance of companies. Using a dataset of Italian manufacturing firms over the period 2006–2015, we explore the effect of size on the attainable production set (input-output space) and on the efficiency distribution, without making any a priori assumptions on the role of size on efficiency. Main findings suggest that size positively affects the efficiency of companies. By exploring the idiosyncratic efficiency, an additional empirical result from the conditional efficiency approach shows that the economic disparities between North, Centre and South of Italy not only limit the foreign investment but also seem to penalize the productivity of Italian-owned companies.