Efficient railway transportation systems are very important for economic development of countries. Although extensive research has been conducted on railway efficiency in developed countries, however, such studies for developing economies in general and Pakistan is lacking. Here, we used data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the technical, pure technical and scale efficiencies of Pakistan railways from 1950 to 2016 and super efficiency model is employed to rank the efficient DMUs. This study uses seven internal factors and three externals factors to analyse efficiency. The empirical result indicates that there are five DMUs with an overall technical efficiency value of 1. The Pakistan railways operate at 86.8% level of overall technical efficiency i.e., inputs could be decreased by 13.2% without sacrificing output if all DMUs were efficient. Furthermore, the contribution of scale inefficiency in overall technical inefficiency has been observed to be smaller than what has been observed due to pure technical inefficiency (managerial inefficiency). The results of the Tobit regression model suggest that economic development and trade have positive effects on technical efficiency while the growth of highways affects it negatively as external factors.

高效的铁路运输系统对于国家的经济发展非常重要。尽管已对发达国家的铁路效率进行了广泛的研究，但对于整个发展中经济体和巴基斯坦都缺乏这样的研究。在这里，我们使用数据包络分析（DEA）来评估1950年至2016年巴基斯坦铁路的技术效率，纯技术效率和规模效率，并采用超效率模型对有效DMU进行排名。本研究使用七个内部因素和三个外部因素来分析效率。实证结果表明，有五个DMU的总体技术效率值为1。巴基斯坦铁路的总体技术效率水平为86.8％，即，如果所有DMU都有效，投入可以减少13.2％，而不会牺牲产出。此外，已经观察到规模效率低下对总体技术效率低下的贡献要小于由于纯粹的技术效率低下（管理效率低下）而观察到的贡献。Tobit回归模型的结果表明，经济发展和贸易对技术效率产生积极影响，而高速公路的增长则对技术效率产生负面影响。