Efficiency analysis of the designations of origin in the Spanish wine sector

The wine Common Market Organisation has established two concepts for recognizing the quality of wines in the European Union (EU). The first corresponds to the so-called Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), and the second to the Protected Geographical Indication (PGI). The set of Spanish PDOs includes the subset of Spanish DOs (Designation of Origin), which have been recognized as quality wines by Spanish authorities since 1932. Spain accounts for 67 DOs but, due to a lack of data, only 34 of them are suitable for carrying out our analysis. We will analyze the efficiency of this subset for the 2008, 2009 and 2010 seasons resorting to Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and using a new additive based efficiency measure known as BAM (Bounded Adjusted Measure). Since we are using panel data, we will also evaluate the productivity associated with this data set resorting to Malmquist indexes. Our results show that the efficiency behavior of the subset of Spanish DOs is uniform over the time periods analyzed and that productivity experiments only minor and irrelevant changes. They also show that three DOs are in a very good competitive position while another three DOs are in a very bad position. We end up suggesting some economic reasons for explaining these results.