Considering the financial ratios on the performance evaluation of highway bus industry

This paper tries to construct a performance evaluation procedure for highway buses with the financial ratio taken into consideration. First, a conceptual framework is redeveloped, based on the one created by Fielding et al ., to help form evaluation items and performance indicators involving both transport and finance aspects. Second, the total performance is divided into three major kinds of efficiency?production, marketing, execution?according to the cycle of operation activities. Third, to overcome the problems of small sample size and unknown distribution of samples, the grey relation analysis is used to select the representative indicators, and the TOPSIS method is used for the outranking of highway bus. In addition, a case study is conducted using four highway bus companies as example. The empirical result shows that the performance evaluation for highway buses could become more comprehensive if financial ratios are considered.