This chapter begins by describing China's policies of economic reform since the inauguration of its open door policy in 1978. This provides the historical context for the country's concurrent reform of its port industry. The evolution and gradual decentralisation of the port governance system is...

This chapter provides an overview of the port of Singapore and then focuses on the governance structure within which it operates. An analysis is undertaken of the main sources of cargoes that pass through the port, either to and from its hinterland region or as transhipments. The overall...

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...

The recent worldwide trend towards devolution in the port industry has spawned considerable variety in the types of governance structures now in place around the world. This chapter discusses the range of devolution models in the global ports sector, as identified by the World Bank and academic...