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It is, I think, easier to understand the rather complex relationships that exist between the costs of letterpress and typewriter setting if one starts by examining the way in which the two systems operate.

The purpose of this chapter is to cover banking efficiency using the concept of the Meta frontier function and to study group and subgroup differences in the production technology. This study estimates the technical efficiency (TE) and technology gap ratios (TGRs) for banks in Islamic countries. Using the assumption of the convex hull of the Meta frontier production set using the virtual Meta frontier within the nonparametric approach as presented by Battese and Rao (2002), Battese et al. (2004), and O'Donnell et al. (2007, 2008) and after relaxing this assumption, the study investigates if there is a significant difference between these two methods. To overcome the deterministic criterion addressed to nonparametric approach, the bootstrapping technique has been applied. The first part of this chapter covers the analytical framework necessary for the definition of a Meta frontier function and its estimation using nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) in the case where we impose the assumption of the convex production set and follows in the case of relaxation of this assumption. Then we estimated the TE and the TGR in concave and nonconcave Meta frontier cases by applying the Bootstrap-DEA approach. The empirical part will be reserved for highlighting these methods on data bank to study the technical and technological performance level and prove if there is a difference between the two methods. Three groups of banks namely commercial, investment, and Islamic banks in 17 Islamic countries over a period of 16 years between 1996 and 2011 are used.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the performance of the Indian non-life (general) insurance sector in terms of total factor productivity (TFP) over the period 2005–2016.

This study utilises Färe‒Primont index (FPI) to access the change in TFP and its components: technical change, technical efficiency and mix and scale efficiency over the observation period. Moreover, it employs the Mann–Whitney U-test to scrutinise the difference between the public and the private insurers in terms of growth in productivity.

The results reveal that the insurance sector possesses a very low level of TFP. Also, the results divulge an improvement of 11.98 per cent in TFP of the insurance sector at an annual average rate of 12.41 per cent over the observation period. The growth in productivity is mainly attributable to the improvement of 10.81 per cent in the scale‒mix efficiency. The progress in scale‒mix efficiency is mainly the result of improvements in residual scale and residual mix efficiency. The results also show that the privately owned insurers have experienced a high productivity growth rate than the state-owned insurers.

The results hold practical implications for the regulators, policymakers and decision makers of the Indian non-life insurance companies.

This study is the first of its kind to use FPI, which satisfies all economically relevant axioms and tests defined by the index number theory to comprehensively access the change in TFP of the Indian non-life insurance sector.

As organizations have expanded globally, control mechanisms utilized in the past may need to be supplemented with a new type of personnel, that of the inpatriate. Expatriates were the most widely used staffing for corporate control, but due to various issues, a complementary set of employees to facilitate corporate goals could be utilized. Inpatriation, as a practical and conceptual means to augment expatriation, is discussed, compared with, and contrasted to, expatriation. This research explores the use of inpatriates in facilitating global control.