Efficiency analysis of container port industry: review of the empirical studies

Abstract

Maritime transport is the backbone of development and improving the economy of many countries because approximately 80 % of the international trade carried by ships, Therefore, many countries have increased and improved their ports efficiency, containers throughputs and ports infrastructure. Furthermore, seaports play an important role in the transportation process because it's serving as the interface between sea and inland transport. Since the middle of the 20th century containerization has reduced the cost of transportation of international trade, this reduction of transport cost by containerization means that most of the container shipping has become automated and more efficient. Furthermore, over the years container port operations are becoming complex as new technologies impose new requirements in equipment handling and infrastructure. This complexity means that, the task of measuring and analyzing efficiency is not simple and is made more difficulte on what to measure, how to measure it, how to express the measure and what are the factors that influence the efficiency of container port. Despite the increasing of studies on container port efficiency, most of these studies merely measure and compare the technical efficiency among ports. Furthermore, these studies show a great degree of differences and arguments among researchers . At the same time not many studies focused on the characteristics that influence the efficiency of container ports. These characteristics such as quality of port infrastructure, the efficiency of customs, size of port,liner shipping connectivity, ownership and so on. This may influence the efficiency of container ports without any interference from the port management. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to further an understanding of the characteristics influence efficiency of container port through a systematic analysis of the existing studies on the port efficiency. The focus is on the factors and methods used to measure and evaluate the efficiency of container port. The expected contribution of this paper is to provide clearly the port activity for which the efficiency assessment is being conducted.