The effect of weather conditions on port technical efficiency

Abstract

Maritime transport is a sector particularly affected by climatic conditions. Once a ship is in the port, ship manoeuvres and port operations can be hindered by the weather conditions related to wind, wave height, rain, fog, etc. Additionally, shipping can also be hindered by weather conditions which leading to demand variability. Therefore, the worse the weather, the greater also the necessity for some overcapacity, which will be used only during demand peaks, remaining unused during low-demand periods. Due to both their direct effect on productivity and their indirect effect through demand variability, weather variables can be important conditioning variables for port productivity. However, to the authors' knowledge, there has been no analysis published which deals with this effect. In this study, we analyse the effect of two weather variables, wind speed and wave height, on port productivity. In particular, a stochastic output distance function approach was used to assess the impact of wind and waves on the technical efficiency of Spanish ports. As in our sample wind and waves are positively correlated with the tidal amplitude, we also included this variable as a control variable. The impact of both weather variables and tidal amplitude were evaluated by means of some simulation analysis. The results confirm the significant influence of weather conditions on port technical efficiency. Moreover, during the sample period (1992–2016) it was found that weather conditions were responsible for a variation of 5.3% in the average technical efficiency of the whole sample.