Technical Efficiency

 Given that improvement in efficiency is a major resource to economic development, this can be applied to each domestic sector of an economy. The objective of this paper is to measure technical efficiency of the Iranian Post Company across the country€™s provinces using data envelopment analysis (DEA). The ranking of technical efficiency has been calculated by using collected data on post offices across 32 Iranian provinces in 2011 based on assumption of constant return to scale imposed.   The study has specified two models of DEA to explore efficiency of post offices for all Iranian provinces. The first model has shown that provinces of Alborz, Semnan, Mazandaran, Isfahan, Tehran and Bushehr are technically efficient, while the second model has clarified the efficient units, which have been located in the 13th, 14th and 19th zones of Tehran province and the 16th zone of Bushehr province.  JEL Classification: C14, L87

 The importance of community's health followed by the consideration of endogenous growth models has led to an increase in health expenditure of countries to speed up economic growth and development. This has made the efficiency of health production function to an essential issue especially in developing countries. Based upon this, the present study with employing the stochastic frontier analysis method looks for identifying the main determinants such as economic ( children immunization and age dependency ratio ) , environmental ( the rule of law ) and social ( globalization ) conditions on technical inefficiency of health production function between member countries of Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in the period of 1998-2007. The empirical results show increasing the efficiency of health production through improvement in economic and environmental condition. But the increase in socialization globalization such as social factor has led to a decrease in technical efficiency that may be due to the lack of appropriate culture of using new technologies and modern social relations affected by the process of globalization in such countries.       JEL Classification: C12 C23 I12 I19