Capacity investment and efficiency cost estimations in major East Asian ports

Joyce M W Low ()
Additional contact information
Joyce M W Low: Department of Air Transportation, Transportation and Logistics, Korea. Aerospace University, 100, Hanggongdae-gil, Hwajeon-Dong, Deokyang-Gu, Goyang-City, Gyeonggi-Do 412-791, South Korea.

Maritime Economics & Logistics, 2010, vol. 12, issue 4, 370-391

Abstract: This study applies an integrated suite of Data Envelopment Analysis models to investigate the various sources of efficiency contributing to the overall efficiency of major ports in Asia and estimates the amount of savings a port can potentially achieve through intelligent capital investments that promote a lean and fully efficient operation. Empirical results reveal that the Asia port industry is generally characterized by non-decreasing returns to scale. Hong Kong, Shanghai, Ningbo, Shenzhen, Incheon and Singapore found to be operating at their most productive scales and are fully technical, scale and mix efficient. Competitiveness benchmarking analysis further shows that Japanese ports will benefit the most by reducing excess capacity and the associated financial commitments through economizing on the deployment of physical resources. Similarly, Busan port in Korea possesses significant potential to regain traffic from its Chinese competitors via cost reduction. However, the competitiveness of the Singapore and Hong Kong ports may be eroded as the Malaysian and Taiwanese ports remove their productivity slacks and improve cost efficiency.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/mel/journal/v12/n4/pdf/mel201013a.pdf Link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/mel/journal/v12/n4/full/mel201013a.html Link to full text HTML (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:marecl:v:12:y:2010:i:4:p:370-391

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nt/journal/41278/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Maritime Economics & Logistics is currently edited by Hercules E. Haralambides

More articles in Maritime Economics & Logistics from Palgrave Macmillan, International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().