Technical Efficiency in the Manufacturing Industry: A Meta‐Regression Analysis

ABSTRACT The goal of this paper is to conduct a meta‐regression of technical efficiency (TE) in the manufacturing industry, which determines the best possible alternatives that will maximize the outputs using a given level of resources or minimize the inputs to produce a given level of output under given technical conditions. It also examines the impacts of methodological and study‐specific attributes on average TE. A total of 103 articles published between 1993 and 2023 were extracted from nine prominent electronic databases. The results discuss a total of 650 TE distributions of manufacturing firms spread all over the world. The findings indicate that improving efficiency makes it possible for an average manufacturing firm in the data set to produce 39% additional output without changing the technology and input. The method of estimating the TE, the functional form of models used, the scale of operations, firm size, and geographic location influence the average TE reported in the literature. Our study advances to extend the literature on TE, and to the best of our knowledge, there has not yet been a published document on a meta‐regression on the TE of manufacturing industries.