Efficiency analysis of East European electricity distribution in transition: legacy of the past?

This paper provides a cross-country efficiency analysis of electricity distribution companies in the East European transition countries of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. We use common nonparametric efficiency measurement such as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Free Disposal Hull (FDH) under different assumptions and apply recent developments of statistical inference in nonparametric frontier models to test our hypotheses. We discuss the empirical problems of cross-country benchmarking approaches, in particular the comparability of different structures of electricity distribution companies. Our results suggest that Poland's distribution companies are still inefficiently small; the Czech Republic features the highest efficiency; and Slovakia and Hungary occupy the middle range. We also note that privatization has had a positive effect on technical efficiency in the four countries. We use the phrase "legacy of the past" to describe the four countries in comparison to the efficiency of electricity distribution companies we studied in Germany.