Regional differences in Taiwan's B&B industry: An alternative meta-frontier analysis

Taiwan's bed and breakfast (B&B) industry has grown rapidly during the last decade, which has helped boost the local economy. In this study, we employed the directional distance function with a quasi-fixed input to evaluate the meta-frontier efficiency of 18 counties and cities with B&B businesses in Taiwan. The empirical results demonstrate that the lowest meta-frontier technical efficiency occurred in 2018 because the central and eastern areas in Taiwan were affected by natural and anthropogenic disasters. In addition, we found that the meta-frontier efficiency of the northern region was greater than that of other regions. The meta-frontier inefficiency of the northern and central regions mainly came from their group technical inefficiency, whereas that of the B&B industry was caused by the technology gap. Moreover, the application of the Boston Consulting Group matrix demonstrated that the most efficient B&Bs were mainly located in the northern and central regions.