Coastal Ports Efficiency Evaluation And Analysis When Considering Undesirable Outputs

With the integration of global trade and economic, port, as a special node of international logistics, is of great significance for the international trade and transportation logistics industry as well as for social development of all countries. Seven of the world’s ten biggest ports are in China and10of the world’s top20largest ports are also in China. But port environmental pollution in our country, especially ship exhaust pollution, threaten the surrounding residents’health and affect the global climate changeseriously.Under the new situation of the global energy crisis and environmental deterioration, the construction of green port has become common pursuit goals of the international port industry.In recent years, the foreign advanced ports introduce green port concept into its development process, and make great achievements. Our country also pay more and more attention to green port construction and ecological construction, formulating the "green port level evaluation standard"; In "the guidance of the transformation and upgrading of advancing harbor", the establishment of green and safe service system is proposed; In addition, both the country’s11th five-year plan and the12th five-year plan propose to build a resource-conserving and environment-friendly society, and further put forward specific requirements of energy conservation and emissions reduction. Port efficiency evaluation, especially the comprehensive efficiency evaluation considering undesirable environmental outputs has the necessity and the urgency.Port pollution problems are becoming more and more serious. However, few literatures take undesirable environmental outputs into consideration when evaluating port efficiency. Considering this situation, this article introduces pollution emissions of21coastal ports as undesirable outputs and employs Generalized Directional Distance Function (GDDF) to evaluate the technical efficiency and comprehensive efficiency. Results show that:(1) Technology efficiency and comprehensive efficiency values of five port groups differ significantly, Bohai-rim port group and Yangtze River Delta port group perform better, while southeast coastal port group, southwest coastal port group and pearl River delta port group perform worse, appearing "strong north and weak south" situation.(2) According to overall efficiency analysis of coastal ports, in the years of2008-2012,21ports’ technology efficiency are generally on the rise, the Rizhao Port with the highest five-year growth rate of279.28%, Qinhuangdao with the lowest growth rate of-5.67%;21ports’ comprehensive efficiency are generally on the decline, the Tianjin Port with the highest five-year growth rate of18.56%, and the Qingdao Port with the lowest growth rate of-62.55%.(3)Rankings of technology efficiency differ from rankings of comprehensive efficiency greatly. Compared with technology efficiency, comprehensive efficiency values are higher and their data variance is small, which are more suitable for ports’ overall performance evaluation.(5) Referring to redundancy analysis, in order to achieve higher comprehensive efficiency, Southeast coastal port group, Southwest coastal port group and Pearl River Delta port group need to reduce investment in the largest proportion, such as Zhuhai Port, in order to achieve higher comprehensive efficiency, needs to reduce0.76%of the length of production berth and76.49%of the number of production berth respectively.