In 2024, a theoretical research paper “Regular Variable Returns to Scale Production Frontier and Efficiency Measurement” was published in the journal “Operations Research”. This journal is on the list of UTD24 which includes 24 leading business journals in the world. The research team consists of Professor Li Sung Ko, Dr. Lee Shu Kam and Dr. Tsang Chun Kei, all from Business, Economic and Public Policy Research Centre, HK Shue Yan University. This research is also a collaboration between Shue Yan University and Dr. He Xinju (currently associate professor of Guangxi University) while he was affiliated with Hufei University of Technology.

This paper is an extension of an earlier 2024 research result of the Shue Yan team: “Partially Convex Production Technology and Efficiency Measurement”, published in Journal of Productivity Analysis which is a top journal in the field of efficiency and productivity analysis. The concept of “regular variable returns to scale” is a common pattern of production in elementary textbooks of Economics but extremely difficult to analyse in theory and no satisfactory tools are available to estimate in empirical studies. In these two papers, the Shue Yan research team has overcome complicated mathematical problems and established a theoretical framework of analysing regular variable returns to scale with single and multiple outputs. The researchers also provided methods that enable practitioners of production theory to apply the concept of regular variable returns to scale to empirical studies.