Evaluating port performance : insights from the ship perspective

Abstract

Ports are complex systems, acting as production units of global supply chains, service providers for their users, and key drivers of the regional economy. With intense competition and the growing awareness of sustainable development, providing efficient and resilient services has become necessary for ports to remain competitive. Consequently, efficiency analyses and resilience studies have been widely applied for port operators to assess their relative performances, identify potential weaknesses and provide directions for improvement. However, an efficient port for port operators may not necessarily be efficient for port users. Additionally, while it is recognized that individual ports are vulnerable to disruptions, research has yet to adequately explore how their interactions within a regional cluster determine the collective resilience of the cluster. This thesis develops a multi-stakeholder framework for evaluating port performance, moving progressively from the efficiency of individual ports to the resilience of interconnected port clusters. The first study reviews literature on port efficiency analyses published before the end of 2023. We found the majority of studies assessed port efficiency from the perspective of port authorities, managers, and operators. Few did it from the perspective of the users and the public. Even fewer noticed the possible conflicts between the port service level and its profitability. Frontier methods are popular in port efficiency evaluation, but publications extending or combining different methods are still very rare. Novelty classifying the studies by efficiency types and analysis perspectives, this study reveals the complex nature of port operations, the possible limitations of traditional efficiency analyses, the reason behind the lack of consensus in measuring port efficiency and the need to develop advanced approaches and incorporate different methods. The second study assesses port efficiencies from the dual perspectives of port operators and shipping companies. Considering port heterogeneity, this study classifies the world’s top 80 container ports into homogeneous groups and employs the meta-frontier Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method to assess their efficiency. The analysis reveals the disparities in port efficiency among different stakeholders and across different port sizes. Large ports demonstrate relatively consistent efficient performance from both perspectives, benefiting from economies of scale and efficient service delivery. In contrast, small and middle-size ports show inconsistent or even opposing efficiency performance when evaluated by port operators and shipping companies. This study provides a reference for port operators and shipping companies to enhance overall efficiency. The third study analyzes the resilience performance of port clusters through the lens of port interactions. We first propose a method to analyze how ports can substitute for one another in managing ship calls during disruptions in a port cluster. Next, we investigate how the internal characteristics of the port cluster, such as connectivity, differences in operational efficiency, and hierarchical structures, affect its overall resilience, utilizing econometric tools. Employing a multi-source dataset that includes AIS data and satellite ship positioning data, we apply our proposed method to assess the resilience of Chinese port clusters during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that dense internal connectivity through ship flows is positively correlated with cluster resilience. In contrast, resilience is undermined in clusters characterized by significant efficiency disparities or a pronounced hierarchical structure dependent on a few core ports. This study suggests that the resilience of a port cluster is a function of inter-port interactions rather than merely the sum of individual port capacities.