An empirical study of the impacts of operating and market conditions on container-port efficiency and benchmarking

Research in Transportation Economics 42 (2013) 28e37

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An empirical study of the impacts of operating and market conditions on container-port efficiency and benchmarking
Khalid Bichou
PORTeC, Centre for transport Studies, Imperial College London, 618, Skempton Building, London SW7 2BU, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history: Available online 25 December 2012 Keywords: Port efficiency Container terminals DEA Market conditions Handling configurations Operating policies

a b s t r a c t
Despite the growing amount of research on container-port efficiency and benchmarking, the literature on the subject is yet to provide stable and consistent results across researchers and in relation to dynamic operating and market conditions. In this paper, we formulate a number of operational hypotheses to test the sensitivity of benchmarking results to port market and operating conditions namely production scale, cargo mix, transhipment ratio, operating configurations, and working procedures. A series of data envelopment analysis (DEA) models are used to measure the operational efficiency of 420 container terminal decision-making units from 2004 till 2010. The results show that variations in operating conditions highly impact terminal efficiency and that future work on container-port performance and benchmarking should take into account the structure and mechanisms underpinning the operations of container ports and terminals. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction In the last decade or so, there has been a growing amount of research into port performance and benchmarking. A review of the contemporary literature on the subject shows an increasing use of frontier methods, notably data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), for measuring and benchmarking port performance and efficiency. For a