Efficiency differences between private and state-owned enterprises in the international petroleum industry

Technical (managerial), scale and allocative efficiency differences between private and state owned firms in the international petroleum industry are estimated. The estimation of Aigner-Chu deterministic frontiers, maximum likelihood stochastic frontiers, and maximum likelihood Gamma frontiers make this analysis the most complete and sophisticated testing of property rights theory available. The empirical findings suggestceteris paribus, that state firms could satisfy the demand for their output with something less than half of their current resource inputs simply by being converted to private, for profit enterprizes.