Pereira Miguel Alves, Dinis Duarte Caldeira, Ferreira Diogo Cunha, Figueira José Rui, Marques Rui Cunha
INESC TEC, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal.
CEG-IST, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Av. Rovisco Pais 1, 1049-001, Lisboa, Portugal.
Expert Syst Appl. 2022 Dec 30;210:118362. doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2022.118362. Epub 2022 Aug 6.
The ongoing outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has been deeply impacting health systems worldwide. In this context, it is pivotal to measure the efficiency of different nations' response to the pandemic, whose insights can be used by governments and health authorities worldwide to improve their national COVID-19 strategies. Hence, we propose a network Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate the efficiencies of fifty-five countries in the current crisis, including the thirty-seven Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries, six OECD prospective members, four OECD key partners, and eight other countries. The network DEA model is designed as a general series structure with five single-division stages - population, contagion, triage, hospitalisation, and intensive care unit admission -, and considers an output maximisation orientation, denoting a social perspective, and an input minimisation orientation, denoting a financial perspective. It includes inputs related to health costs, desirable and undesirable intermediate products related to the use of personal protective equipment and infected population, respectively, and desirable and undesirable outputs regarding COVID-19 recoveries and deaths, respectively. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study proposing a cross-country efficiency measurement using a network DEA within the context of the COVID-19 crisis. The study concludes that Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and New Zealand are the countries exhibiting higher mean system efficiencies. Their national COVID-19 strategies should be studied, adapted, and used by countries exhibiting worse performances. In addition, the observation of countries with large populations presenting worse mean efficiency scores is statistically significant.
正在爆发的新型冠状病毒肺炎疫情对全球卫生系统产生了深远影响。在此背景下，衡量不同国家应对疫情的效率至关重要，各国政府和卫生当局可借鉴这些见解来改进本国的新冠疫情应对策略。因此，我们提出一种网络数据包络分析（DEA）方法，以评估五十五个国家在当前危机中的效率，其中包括三十七个经济合作与发展组织（OECD）成员国、六个OECD准成员国、四个OECD主要伙伴国以及其他八个国家。网络DEA模型设计为具有五个单部门阶段的一般序列结构，即人口、传播、分诊、住院和重症监护病房收治阶段，并考虑了产出最大化导向（代表社会视角）和投入最小化导向（代表财务视角）。它包括与卫生成本相关的投入、分别与个人防护装备使用和感染人口相关的合意和不合意中间产品，以及分别与新冠疫情康复和死亡相关的合意和不合意产出。据作者所知，这是第一项在新冠疫情危机背景下使用网络DEA进行跨国效率评估的研究。研究得出结论，爱沙尼亚、冰岛、拉脱维亚、卢森堡、荷兰和新西兰是平均系统效率较高的国家。表现较差的国家应研究、借鉴并采用它们的国家新冠疫情应对策略。此外，人口众多的国家平均效率得分较低这一观察结果具有统计学意义。
