Measuring the efficiency of forest districts with multiple working circles

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a methodology extensively applied to measuring the relative efficiency of decision making units with multiple inputs and multiple outputs. Herein, a DEA model is developed to measure the efficiency of forest districts which are divided into a number of subdistricts called working circles (WCs). The idea is to construct district production frontiers from the WCs of individual districts. Superimposing the district production frontiers of different districts one derives the forest production frontier. The closeness of a district production frontier to the forest production frontier indicates this district's efficiency. As an illustration, the developed model measures the eight districts, with a total of thirty-four WCs, of the national forests of the Republic of China on Taiwan. The results provide the top management with an idea of how far each district can be expected to improve its performance when compared with other districts.