Browsing by Author "Chaouk, Mohammed"

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    A critical review of airport privatisation in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Case study of Medina Airport
    (Elsevier, 2019-02-08) Chaouk, Mohammed; Pagliari, Romano I.; Miyoshi, Chikage
    Saudi Arabia is one of the few Middle-Eastern states to have undertaken an airport privatisation programme. Medina was one of several airports that have been privatised in Saudi Arabia when it was awarded to Tibah Airports in 2012 under a Build-Transfer-Operate agreement. This paper compares the performance of Medina Airport in terms of traffic, revenues, costs and profitability with projections made during the due-diligence period prior to the airport’s privatisation. We found that the airport benefitted from favourable market conditions post-privatisation which facilitated the attainment of some important achievements with regard to route development and customer service. However, we also found that profitability was lower than forecast during the due-diligence process prior to privatisation and that this was mainly as a result of unexpected interventions by the regulator GACA. We have raised important policy implications for future privatisation transactions, the success of which is crucially dependent on the Kingdom minimising the level of regulatory risk facing potential investors. There are cultural dimensions, human resources strategies and administrative governance issues in addition to the very specific nature of the socio-political environment which are all factors that need to be considered in future privatisation transactions.
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    The impact of national macro-environment exogenous variables on airport efficiency
    (Elsevier, 2019-10-28) Chaouk, Mohammed; Pagliari, Romano; Moxon, Richard
    Our paper tests the extent to which airport efficiency is affected by national macro-environmental factors. The literature on airport performance measurement is extensive but has tended to focus mainly on estimating the effects on efficiency from what are mostly endogenous variables. We undertake a two-stage analysis of 59 international airports observations in the Europe and Asia-Pacific regions. The first stage involves the use of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to measure the efficiency of these airports. This is followed by a second stage, where we use a Truncated Regression model that incorporates the Simar and Wilson bootstrapping technique to test the extent to which a set of macro-environmental factors affect airport efficiency. Results reveal that a state's air transport sector output, institutional quality and robustness, the macro-economic environment, safety and security, and human development, all have a significant influence on the performance of airports. The result of this study fills the gap in the literature related to the non-discretionary variables affecting the performance of airports. It also suggests that policymakers and airport managers consider the identified factors when benchmarking airports.