Malmquist productivity indices and plant capacity utilisation: new proposals and empirical application

The purpose of this contribution is to compute the popular Malmquist productivity index while adding a component representing plant capacity utilisation. In particular, this is—to the best of our knowledge—the first empirical application estimating both input- and output-oriented Malmquist productivity indices in conjunction with the corresponding input- and output-oriented plant capacity utilisation measures. Our empirical application focuses on a provincial data set of tourism activities in China over the period 2008–2016. The results contain the output- and input-oriented Malmquist productivity indices, some Spearman rank correlations between both, a t-test whether these indices differ from unity, and some bootstrapping analysis. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10479-022-04771-8.