On the consistency of aggregate production frontiers

This paper investigates the consistency of efficiency frontier methods applied at the aggregate level. We estimate eight aggregate production frontiers on a sample of 93 countries, depending on three methodological choices for the specification of the frontier: the choice of the approach technique (stochastic frontier approach or data envelopment analysis), the specification of human capital as an input, and the nature of returns to scale. We observe some differences on the descriptive statistics of the distributions of the efficiency scores, but also a very high significant and positive correlation between scores rankings regardless of the methodological choices made. Our results tend then to suggest the consistency of the efficiency techniques at the aggregate level.