This seminar will take place on May 27 at 15:30, online via Zoom (link below)
https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/81422552067?pwd=9C52fEzx8s5G4AaYDKP96517LT413z.1
Our seminars are free to attend and open to everyone. Please share with whomever may be interested.
Summary
Convergence in productivity examines if entities in an industry get closer to the best practices or if the gap between the frontiers of the best and worst performers decreases over time. In a multi-input multi-output setting, the assessment of sigma- and beta-convergence can be measured with the use of non-parametric frontier techniques, such as data envelopment analysis. We propose an innovative approach to estimate convergence in the context of performance assessments resting on composite indicators, accounting for desirable and undesirable indicators. This methodology rests on ‘Benefit-of-the-Doubt’ models, specified with a directional distance function. It is applied to the Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO) in order to study their convergence in terms of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) ‘Good health and well-being’. We collected data for all years since the proposal of the SDGs, covering the period between 2016 and 2020. The results show that all WHO regions are beta-divergent, especially because of the generalised decline of the Worst Practice Frontier (WPF), alongside an improvement at a lower rate of the Best Practice Frontier (BPF). The regional analysis also revealed sigma-convergence in the Region of the Americas and the Eastern Mediterranean Region; the South-East Asia and African Regions exhibited -divergence; the Western Pacific and European Regions remained stable in terms of the performance spread regarding the BPF. At the worldwide level, we also observed an increase of the gap between the BPF and the WPF, although the performance spread around the worldwide BPF remained relatively stable.
Speaker's bio
Miguel Alves Pereira is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC) and an invited teaching assistant at the Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade de Lisboa (IST-UL). He earned his doctoral degree in Engineering and Management at the same institution in 2021, where he also earned his integrated master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2018. His main interests concern operational research and management science (with an emphasis on the development of efficiency measurement and performance assessment models), and their applications to sustainable development and the health and water and sanitation sectors. He is the author of 13 scientific publications in several top international peer-reviewed journals, as well as a referee in 17 of them.