Incentive Regulation and Efficiency of Portuguese Port Authorities

Carlos Barros

Maritime Economics & Logistics, 2003, vol. 5, issue 1, 55-69

Abstract: In all European seaports, organisational efficiency forms a vital component of the activities to improve competitiveness in the market. As public enterprise entities, Portuguese seaports rely on government subsidies to meet their deficits. The policy of subsidisation is part of the regulatory procedures that are intended to provide incentives for increasing productive efficiency, thereby allowing seaports to share in the social gains from efficiency in the form of greater, or at least stable, employment and local development. In addition, the drive for greater efficiency is meant to assist the ports' preparation for some kind of privatisation. In this paper, we analyse the technical and allocative efficiencies of Portuguese seaport authorities in order to investigate if the state's policy is achieving its aims. We find that the results are, at best, mixed, leading us to conclude that the incentive regulation carried out by the government's regulatory body, the Maritime Port Agency, is not achieving its aims. Therefore, we propose a policy revision to enforce efficiency, based on a governance environment framework. Maritime Economics & Logistics (2003) 5, 55–69. doi:10.1057/palgrave.mel.9100060

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/mel/journal/v5/n1/pdf/9100060a.pdf Link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/mel/journal/v5/n1/full/9100060a.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:5:y:2003:i:1:p:55-69

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 ().