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Determinants and strategies for the development of container terminals

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Abstract

The paper examines an important player in the container industry: the container terminal. We evaluate how terminal efficiency operation is affected by the following factors: terminal type, operation type, scale efficiency and returns to scale. In so doing, we test how the typology and operation of terminals and the level of scale efficiency that a terminal can achieve, represent significant factors in the development and growth of the container terminal industry. The analysis is based on the assessment of 165 container terminals worldwide. We develop the estimation through the application of stochastic frontier analysis. We demonstrate that container terminals are more efficient than multi-purpose terminals, and that, compared with local operators, global terminal operators do not have a dominant position in international maritime trade in terms of productivity and efficiency. However, global terminal operators appear to be more dominant than local operators when we examine the Mediterranean Basin. In the final part of the paper we suggest how resource-constrained container terminals may improve their scale efficiency and identify general strategies related to container terminal investments.

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Notes

  1. The classification of the world region is the following: North America, North Europe, South Europe, Far East, South East Asia, Middle East, Caribbean, Central America, South America, Oceania, South Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe (Drewry Shipping Consultants 2008).

  2. The port of Tanjung Pelepas in Indonesia, which is usually included in the set of the top container ports worldwide, is not considered in this analysis because we do not have satisfactory data on its terminals.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UCL QASER Laboratory, University College London, Gower Street, London, UK

    Francesca Medda

  2. Drewry Shipping Consultants, 15-17 Christopher Street, London, UK

    Qianwen Liu

Authors
  1. Francesca Medda
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  2. Qianwen Liu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Francesca Medda.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 13.

Table 13 Estimation result of Translog models
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Appendix 2

See Table 14.

Table 14 Estimation result of Cobb-Douglas models
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Medda, F., Liu, Q. Determinants and strategies for the development of container terminals. J Prod Anal 40, 83–98 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11123-012-0291-1

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