Abstract
The growth in intermodal transport has led to an increase in competition between ports. Other factors, such as the globalisation of the economy, European Union interest in integrating the port system into the Transeuropean Transport Network and the reform of the Spanish port system, have encouraged the Spanish Port Authorities to develop competitive strategies to extend their hinterlands. These strategies have often focused on improving port infrastructure in order to improve the efficiency of their services. In this paper, we analyse the extent to which investment expenditure has led to improvements in efficiency and how far this improved efficiency has increased the port's ability to attract traffic. To do so, we use DEA and study inter-port traffic redistribution from the land side. The analysis focused on the Ports of Bilbao and Valencia not only because they are very important in the Spanish port system but also because they both stand out for their investment expenditure, which has led to quite different results. We conclude by discussing the consequences of investment and port location for efficiency and the capacity to attract traffic, respectively.
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Notes
Arocena and Rodríguez (1998) apply the Malmquist sequence production index in terms of output to the Spanish electricity sector under the assumption of technology with constant returns and point out that it may be able to solve problems of small samples.
Verifying the homogeny meant that contingency tables had to be drawn up for the interport distribution of maritime traffic for each one of the 47 Spanish peninsular provinces. The rows of these tables showed the years and the columns showed the ports. Each ton of merchandise sent to each port from the corresponding province in each one of the years analysed was considered to be one event.
We considered that the port selection of a province was ordinally stable for a particular port when the corresponding value of λ was below 0.15. For provinces in which we observed stability in order of ranking for the Ports of Bilbao or Valencia, or both, we conducted a χ2 homogeneity test to evaluate the null hypothesis of independence between port selection and year of selection, and so check whether strength of preference was maintained. Provinces were classified as stable or ordinally stable according to whether they passed or failed this test. The other provinces, classified as ordinally unstable, were those for whom one of the two ports studied, or both, were always in the top three for that province but whose ranking changed beyond the limit established for considering the province stable.
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Garcia-Alonso, L., Martin-Bofarull, M. Impact of Port Investment on Efficiency and Capacity to Attract Traffic in Spain: Bilbao versus Valencia. Marit Econ Logist 9, 254–267 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.mel.9100183
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.mel.9100183