Measuring Port Efficiency: An Application of Data Envelopment Analysis

Available studies have not provided a satisfactory answer to the problem of making international comparisons of port efficiency. This study applies data envelopment analysis (DEA) to provide an efficiency ranking for five Australian and eighteen other international container ports. While DEA has been applied to a wide number of different situations where efficiency comparisons are required, this technique has not previously been applied to ports. The DEA technique is useful in resolving the measurement of port efficiency because the calculations are non-parametric and do not require specification or knowledge of a priori weights for the inputs or outputs, as is required for estimation of efficiency using production functions.