Analysing global railway passenger transport through two-staged efficiency model

Public passenger transports have increased their popularity in recent years, however, we know very little about the technical and financial efficiency of this sector. In this study, we analyse global railway passenger countries with data envelopment analysis (DEA) method from the performance hierarchy perspective. Findings reveal that railways do not follow proposed hierarchy (only with small sub-sample exception), but instead amount of resources and completed investments play most important role regarding to performance. Efficiency level overall in passenger transportation is low, and differences between actors is significant. However, during recent decade most of the actors show increasing returns on scale.