Time at ports in short sea shipping: When timing is crucial

Ancor Suárez-Alemán (), Lourdes Trujillo () and Kevin P B Cullinane ()
Additional contact information
Kevin P B Cullinane: School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, SE-405 30, Sweden.

Maritime Economics & Logistics, 2014, vol. 16, issue 4, 399-417

Abstract: From the perspective of Short Sea Shipping (SSS), as an intermodal competitor in the freight market, the time spent within the whole transport corridor is a major issue, in contrast to deep sea shipping where differences in time may not be as relevant as, for example, the contract of carriage or a ship’s position, among other aspects. Although there exist numerous studies that have estimated port or terminal efficiency, most have focused on quantities as outputs and factors such as labour force or capital as inputs, mainly through the use of techniques such as data envelopment analysis or stochastic frontier analysis. The structure of the time ships spend in ports has generally not been considered. After reviewing the port efficiency literature and by taking into consideration the structure of the time ships spend in SSS ports or terminals, this article develops a theoretical analysis of this concept and proposes the direct utilization of the time in ports as a suitable measure for port efficiency analysis. From an empirical example, we show how the inclusion of time in efficiency analysis can modify the results derived from a more traditional approach based just on quantities.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/mel/journal/v16/n4/pdf/mel20145a.pdf Link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/mel/journal/v16/n4/full/mel20145a.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:16:y:2014:i:4:p:399-417

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 ().