Ownership form & air navigation service provider performance

The ownership form of Air Navigation Service Providers varies across countries ranging from state agencies, to semi-private firms with for-profit or not-for-profit mandates. This research focusses on the link between the performance of ANSPs and their ownership form. A theoretical economic model suggests that effort to achieve efficiency will be higher in the case of public companies with a board of stakeholders composed of airspace users and in the case of private companies in which stakeholders are also shareholders. A stochastic frontier analysis estimation of the production and cost functions of 37 European air navigation service providers over nine years suggests that the public-private ownership form achieves statistically significantly higher efficiency levels compared to a governmental corporation which in turn is an improvement over a state agency.