Efficiency Evaluation Research Of Container Ports In China Mainland

Ports become more important in national economy with the expanding external trade in China, and there is fury competition between them. Therefore, each port should improve its efficiency to win in the international and domestic competition.The traditional DEA model appling to measure the port efficiency in previous researches is proved to be valuable. But in most of them, indexes weight depended on model itself without preference which made the result unreasonable or impossible what was just the disadvantage of it.The DEA model with restraint cone (DEAHP model) was firstly introduced to evaluate the ports efficiency, where made use of AHP method to make restraint cone of input and output variables.This paper selected 8 container ports what were Port of ShangHai, Shenzhen, Tianjin, NingBo, GuangZhou, XiaMen, DaLian with data from 2003 to 2006, totally 32 DMUs. Berth length, berth depth, container yard area, the number of quayside gantry and yard gantry were selected as input variables, while container throughput as output variables to study ports efficiency. The paper analyzed the comparative efficiency of different ports from lateral vibration and the efficiency trend of the same port from longitudinal vibration. It concluded that Port of ShangHai and ShenZhen had high efficiency scores and exhibited a bright development trend because of the fast development of hinterland economic and port orientation, while Port of XiaMen had low efficiency score owning to the slow development of it; the oversize of port hardware scale was the main reason of inefficiency of NingBo and GuangZhou; The three ports in BoHai region competing furiously blocked their development and improvement of port efficiency.The result showed that the DEAHP model not only gets over the shortage of no limitation in weights, where weights were determinated by model itself with on affection of subjective factors, But also identifies the efficiency DMUs.