Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiencies of ten of the leading European ports. The motivation of the research refers to the relevant topic of selection of indicators that can be involved in the comparative analysis. Concerning the theoretical model, the authors’ efforts are especially directed towards the usage of the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and of the data envelopment analysis (DEA). These techniques have been widely adopted for benchmarking and performance evaluation by involving indicators based on data from National Accounts. If one of these indicators, such as labour force consistency, is not available at a specific level of aggregation, detailed assumptions are needed to address this complication. The present study proposes an additive model in order to provide an estimation of ports’ economic activities by fixing the port activity boundaries and the spatial perimeter of the firms investigated. Several NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) levels and NACE (EU Statistical Classification of Economic Activities) codes are fixed to offer a useful comparable labour indicator. Empirical results reveal that each port area presents a combination of the NACE categories which significantly impact the efficiency that can reach very high performance values through both the SFA and DEA techniques. Since the managers can choose which sectors to improve, which particular improvement strategies to support, which specific service to add, their decisions impact this performance evaluation, and their performance can be verified through the approaches proposed.
Highlights
Port authorities and port operators manage the new context of supply and logistics chains
This paper aims to analyse the efficiency of ten of the leading European container ports focusing on the labour force estimation, and considering as a case study the port of Antwerp compared to the port of Rotterdam
Spearman correlations have been calculated by considering the data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) efficiency scores to verify whether the ports’ ranks are the same
Summary
Port authorities and port operators manage the new context of supply and logistics chains. The traditionally strong competition among the ports affects port performance at intra-port and inter-port levels (Castelein et al 2019). This competitiveness has encouraged management to address performance evaluation methods and benchmarking models (Figueiredo De Oliveira and Cariou 2015; European Commission 2016; Wiegmans and Witte 2017; Ferreira et al 2018; Ha et al.2019). The performance evaluation approaches dedicate increasing attention to Quintano et al Journal of Shipping and Trade (2020) 5:18 sustainability criteria (IAPH - International Association of Ports and Harbours 2007; Baynes et al 2011; Chang and Wang 2012; Lam and Notteboom 2014; Laxe et al 2016; Roos and Kliemann-Neto 2017; Chang et al 2018). An additional issue is that there is no reliable database of collective information of international port dimensions (Cheon et al 2010)
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