Efficiency Analysis Of Russian Container Terminals In The Baltic Sea Area Based On:The Stochastic Frontier Model

This study explores and contributes to the estimation of efficiency of the Russian Container Terminals located in the Baltic Sea Basin.I chose this topic because the Baltic Sea Basin is extremely important to the Russian Federation.In term of a turnover it constantly takes the leading role among the five water basins represented in Russia:the Baltic Sea Basin,the Caspian Sea Basin,the Azov-Black Sea Basin,the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic Sea Basin.Since,there is no,to extent of our knowledge,any research that has been conducted on the topic,so,the original idea of the thesis is to fill in the research gap.Although,many of the Russian Ports has long history of development dated back even to 17th century,the container terminals have significantly evolved,particularly over the last 8-10 years,especially in the Baltic Sea Area,where the majority of the container terminals were constructed in the early 2010s.During the last years,despite all the new expansion projects and renovations that have been made to increase the output of the container terminal in the Baltic Sea Basin,they still,all except one,showed the steadily decline in the throughput.The situation has slightly changed starting from the end of the 2016 year and till present days.This study was aimed to answer two objectives.The first one to identify the main container terminals of the Russian Federation,located in the Baltic Sea Area.Since,we do not have the pure container-oriented ports,in this study were mentioned container terminals,being a part of the actual ports.The second objective was to estimate the general efficiency of the ports and find the key factors influencing on it.In order to calculate the efficiency of the Russian Container Terminals in the Baltic Sea Area the Stochastic Frontier model based on the Cobb-Douglas Production Functions was used in order to find the correlation between the four input factors and one output variable.Furthermore,the model was extended by the inefficiency model.The thesis is divided into five chapters:Introduction,Key definitions and Russian Ports in Baltic Sea Area,Stochastic Frontier Analysis,Data collection and Estimation Results and Conclusion.