COVAX is one of three pillars of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, which was launched in April in response to this pandemic. Bringing together governments, global health organisations, manufacturers, scientists, private sector, civil society and philanthropy, with the aim of providing innovative and equitable access to COVID-19 diagnostics, treatments and vaccines. The COVAX pillar is focussed on the latter. It is the only truly global solution to this pandemic because it is the only effort to ensure that people in all corners of the world will get access to COVID-19 vaccines once they are available, regardless of their wealth.

The non-convex metafrontier model was introduced by O’Donnell et al (2008) with a brief sketch and interpreted by Tiedemann et al (2011) through a graphical instruction. However, the specific function was not present in former studies. In order to strengthen the non-parametric metafrontier approach, this study proposes the specific modelling function and calculational operation for the non-convex metafrontier model and applies the developed model to investigate the technology gaps between the four operating types of Taiwan’s international tourist hotels. The empirical findings show that management contract technology has achieved the potential best practice within the four groups and that there exists a significant gap between the potential best practice and present performance in the domestic, franchise, and membership chain technologies.

Introduced by Hayami and Ruttan (1970) and operationalized by Battese et al. (2004) as well as O’Donnell et al. (2008), the metafrontier efficiency analysis has widely been applied in various environments. Within this approach, firms may be classified into different groups, each operating under the same technology. The metatechnology then includes all production possibilities that can in principle be achieved by assuming that the operating environment for firms can be changed.

This paper suggests how stochastic nonparametric envelopment of data (StoNED) can be extended as an estimator in the metafrontier efficiency analysis. Both convex and non-convex metatechnologies are formed and a semi-nonparametric estimation technique for the corresponding metafrontiers is developed. Remaining consistent with the metafrontier theory, the resulting estimated metafrontiers always envelope the estimated group frontiers.

There are two different ways in which the metatechnology could be defined: convex and non-convex metatechnologies. Whereas the former is the convex hull of all group technologies, the latter is formed as a pure union of the group technologies. The analytical framework necessary for the application of these metatechnologies has been given by O’Donnell et al. (2008). An updated overview of the metafrontier methodology can be found in Kerstens et al. (2015).

Thanks and Regards,

Robert Her.