Study On The Efficiency Of China’s Container Ports Based On The Stochastic Frontier Model

In recent years, with the continuous development of our out-going economy, Chinese container ports is playing a more and more important role in the international market. In 2012, the container throughput of China reaches 177 million TEU, up 132.89% from 2005(76 million TEU) year-on-year——with double-digit average annual growth. With the sharply rising of Chinese container throughput, higher requests to the technical efficiency and resource allocation of container terminals were proposed. But at present, container ports in our country are still in the mode of relatively extensive management. Besides the impacts of resources and environment constraints on the development of container port are becoming more and more obvious, and further restrict container ports to enhance its competitiveness. Therefore, it has very important significance to study the orientation of resource allocation of container ports in-depth.This thesis is supported by the MOE(Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences(Project No.10YJC630039). The major research content of this essay is as follows:First, 72 container ports in China from 2005 to 2012 are collected as the unbalanced panel data, and time-dependent translog production function model is adopted to measure the technical efficiency and total factor productivity of Chinese container terminals. Second, the effects of input factors(port facilities, berth, manpower, route, etc.) and exogenous factors(ownership structure, operating scale, talent proportion, proportion of international routes, local foreign trade development, etc.) on the technical efficiency of the container ports are explored. Besides,based on stochastic frontier production function model, the overall and regional characteristics of the total factor productivity and its decomposition of Chinese container ports are analyzed in this paper.The results show that the technical efficiency of Chinese container ports is about 0.6, with great space to improve. In contrast, the technical efficiency of Southwest coastal area and the southeast coastal is lower, about 0.5. Equipment investment is found to have a greater positive influence on efficiency than berth, manpower, and the other input factors. It is also found that the degree of privatization of a port has an inverted U-shaped relationship with technical efficiency, and the best extent of private participation in the container terminals is between domestic joint ventures and Sino-foreign joint ventures. In contrast, the scale of the port has a U-shaped relationship, and the cut-off point of port size is between the small port and medium-sized port. Foreign trade dependence and the proportion of international routes have a positive influence on technical efficiency. Finally, the total factor productivity dropped from 0.156 to 0.105, and its three components(TPC, TEC, SEC) also slow down in General or regional to varying degrees. At the same time, scale reward index less than 1 means the increase rate of output less than the increase rate of investment.