A note on productivity change in French and Italian seaports

International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics, 2017

This article measures productivity changes during 2009-2014 of the six largest Norwegian container ports against 14 similar small-and medium-sized ports in the Nordic countries and the UK. The approach used is the data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based Malmquist productivity change index (MPI), which carries out a decomposition isolating the technical progress of the efficiency improvement. The major findings are: 1) the sampled Norwegian ports seem to perform better than their international counterparts in terms of efficiency scores; 2) when productivity growth over time is considered, the Norwegian ports appear to be overperformers but a statistical test proves that they are not; 3) overall, total productivity increased by approximately 0.6% per year for all ports considered and this progress is explained more by technological improvements and less by efficiency change, which declined during the period studied. This study provides Norwegian decision makers with new information regarding the performance of Norway's container port industry.

2007

A global reform of the Portuguese port sector favoured the involvement of private operators in the provision of port services. The port system comprises five major ports, each managed by an independent Port Authority. These were set up as limited liability companies with all their shares held by the State. Port services are gradually being passed on to private operators through concession contracts. The Portuguese and three other countries port sectors were analysed in terms of regulatory policy, governance model, institutional setting and scale and type of operations. The analysed countries were Spain, because it is our main competitor, and the Netherlands and the UK, whose ports had the top scores in the performance measurement procedure carried out. In this procedure reliability and coherence were stressed in order to achieve realistic and useful results. All the options in the performance analysis were thoroughly discussed and justified. Forty one ports from eleven European countries were included in the sample. The study relied on input oriented Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models, using as inputs Operational Expenses (OPEX) and Capital Expenses (CAPEX); and as outputs conventional general cargo, containerized cargo, roll on-roll off cargo, dry bulk cargo, liquid bulk cargo and passengers. All the Portuguese ports had very low efficiency scores except Lisbon which was deemed as efficient due to a very high volume of passenger traffic. The possible cost reduction if the Portuguese seaports had performed efficiently was estimated about 64 million euros in 2005.

Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, 2009

The purpose of this paper is to further an understanding of the port sector through a systematic analysis of the existing studies assessing the economic efficiency and productivity of the sector. The emphasis is on the measurement methodologies, the variables used and the results in terms of the various port activities as well as on the relevance of dimensions such as port size, ownership, location, and so on. One of the main contributions of our analysis is the evidence provided for the need very clearly to isolate and spell out the port activity for which the efficiency assessment is being conducted. From an economic policy viewpoint, our assessment also points to the necessity to more closely involve the relevant authorities in order to improve the data collection system. © 2009 LSE and the University of Bath

Maritime Economics & Logistics, 2007

Because of their critical strategic role, ports have all traditionally been subject to some form of government control even if the legal form and the intensity of this control have varied across countries. The member countries of the European Union have not been different from the rest of the world in this respect. A significant difference however is the recurrent effort to integrate, in a coordinated way, the port sector in a transeuropean transport network (TEN-T) through the adoption of a common legal framework. In this context, if the objective of the reforms is to ensure that port networks, integrated in combined transport networks, become competitors of the road network, the concept of port efficiency becomes central. This paper provides an overview of the evolution of the European Port Legislation and shows how comparative economic measures can be used to highlight the scope for port efficiency improvements, essential to allow short sea shipping transport to compete with road transport in Europe. To our knowledge, this paper is also the first effort of estimating technical efficiency of European Port Authorities. The average port efficiency in 2002 was estimated to be around 60%, denoting that ports could have handled 40% more traffic with the same resources.

Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, 2022

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

International Journal of Data Analysis Techniques and Strategies, 2013

During the last years, there was rapid development in the world port industry which is considered to have resulted from the increase of universal trade. The key to the development of each port is its adaptability to the earliest developments and its resistance to the increasing competition. The influence zones of each port are characterised by instability, while each port authority aims at the creation and exploitation of competitive assets, setting store on specialisation and increase of productivity of each port's functions. The aims of this study are the comparative efficiency evaluation of ports in the Mediterranean with the use of DEA analysis, the exploitation of the factors that affect ports' efficiency using a second-stage Tobit analysis and the potential of each port in the era of larger container volumes attraction. The study will focus on the ports which display or are able to display significant achievement in transhipment movement.

2006

As the clearinghouses for a major portion of the world's rapidly increasing international trade flows, ocean ports and the efficiency with which they process cargo have become an ever more important topic. Yet, there exist very little data that allows one to compare port efficiency measures of any kind across ports and, especially, over time. This paper provides a new

Maritime Economics & Logistics, 2003

1 A u s t r a l U n i v e r s i t y, A r g e n t i n a ; 2 E c o n o m i c C o m m i s s i o n f o r L a t i n A m e r i c a n a n d t h e C a r i b b e a n , S a n t i a g o , C h i l e ; 3 I n t e r -A m e r i c a n D e v e l o p m e n t B a n k , Wa s h i n g t o n , U S A . E -m a i l : r i c a r d o . s a n c h e z @ l y c o s . c o m This paper examines the determinants of waterborne transport costs, with particular emphasis on the efficiency at port level. Its main contribution is (1) to generate statistically quantifiable measures of port efficiency from a survey of Latin American common user ports, and (2) to estimate a model of waterborne transport costs, including the previously generated port efficiency measures as explanatory variables. In order to incorporate different port efficiency measures from the survey, we use principal component analysis (PCA). Our estimations show that the specified variables in the model explain a great proportion of the change in waterborne transport costs. With regard to port efficiency, the result is especially important for one of the port efficiency measures obtained through PCA with an estimated elasticity equivalent to that of distance. Other explanatory variables which show to be statistically significant are the monthly liner service availability, distance, and the goods' value per ton. The conclusions are relevant for policy makers as they show and quantify that port efficiency is a relevant determinant of a country's competitiveness -and in this respect, there still exist big differences among Latin American countries.