This chapter describes the governance structures of the port authorities of the major Dutch seaports. This description is based on a framework to assess the fit between the environment, governance model, strategy and capabilities of the port authority. Changes in the port environment have...

The purpose of this chapter is to apply contingency theory to the management and governance of ports. It describes port devolution as part of a larger attempt by governments to apply the "one best way" principles of new public management (NPM) to the transportation sector. As an alternative...

This chapter presents methodologies for evaluating the economic performance of a port. This performance may be evaluated from the standpoint of technical efficiency, cost efficiency and effectiveness by comparing the port's actual throughput with its economic technically efficient, cost...

One of the premises of devolution is that productivity gains will result from better management of the resources of the entity devolved. The success of a devolution program, however, is difficult to measure and may be a product of many variables. A review of the literature on port devolution...

The chapter provides empirical evidence that indicators for different port characteristics have a statistically significant and strong impact on international maritime transport costs. It reports on empirical work on trade among 16 Latin-American countries. The database incorporates 75,928...

This chapter analyses the relevance of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to the estimation of productive efficiency in the container port industry. Following an exposition of the DEA methodology, the many previous applications of the technique to the port industry are reviewed and assessed. The...

This paper estimates the relative technical efficiency of a sample of European container ports using the cross-sectional version of the [`]stochastic frontier model' under the assumption that the functional form of the production frontier is the log-linear Cobb-Douglas function. The estimated...

Most practical and theoretical approaches to port performance measurement benchmarking are reducible to three broad categories: performance metrics and index methods, economic impact studies and efficiency frontier approaches. However, despite the plethora of performance models and measurement...

This chapter considers developments and changes in port policy and regulation occurring in the United Kingdom over the last few decades. This provides relevant contextual background relating to the issues and arguments surrounding the sale of former state-owned ports in the UK, the different...