Explaining firms efficiency in the Ivorian manufacturing sector: a robust nonparametric approach

In this paper, we provide an analysis of Côte d’Ivoire firms performances and study the impact of qualitative external environmental factors on firm efficiencies. We adapt the one‐step nonparametric robust methodology of Daraio and Simar 2005 to take in account qualitative environmental factors and we also compare the differences of behavior among two sub groups of firms characterized by different levels of technology. The sensitivity of our conclusions to environmental factors is analyzed using a bootstrapped test. We also check the robustness of our results upon time on two different years of observations.