Identifying efficiency drivers in the greek sausage industry: a double bootstrap DEA approach

The paper investigates technical efficiency determinants for sausage industry in Greece over the period of 1994–2007. A double bootstrap data envelopment analysis is applied in order to obtain robust estimates of efficiency scores and regression variable coefficients in the presence of serial correlation between the efficiency scores measures and explanatory variables. The primal results show that (i) the level of domestic sausage consumption, the firm's integration in a group, the knowledge and skills of employees, as well as the international expansion of firms are significant determinants for performance improvement; (ii) the firm size and productive flexibility contributes negatively to efficiency; (iii) the Greece integration in the European Economic and Monetary Union and firm age, as well as several managerial practices related to vertical integration, firm's innovation activities and capital intensity do not have a statistical significant impact on performance.