Evaluating Operational Performance Of Container Ports Along The Maritime Silk Road Using Data Envelopment Analysis Model

In port container industry,operational port performance evaluation is critical and vital to everyone and anyone who has any participation with the industry,with an intention to reflect the magnitude to which resources utilized relative to optimal levels and reveal their position in this competitive environment.Generally,ports performance is evaluated as per the quantity of containers transferred through a port,known as container throughput,globally measured in TEUs,on the notion that the ports are throughput maximizers.Nonetheless there are no standard methods whatsoever that are accepted as applicable to performance evaluation in the container port industry.Thus,the objective of this research is to evaluate the operational performance of container ports along the Maritime Silk Road(MSR)using Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA).The scope of this research focuses on 13 container ports along the 21st century(MSR),a part of the One Belt One Road(OBOR),while as using DEA modelling tool to analyze the operational performance in terms of technical efficiency of these 13 container ports over a period of 7 years from 2010 to 2016.Data used in this research was quantitative by character.Evaluation of operational performance was done by using Malmquist DEA with technical efficiency variable return to scale(VRS).The results of this research unveil that six out of the 13 container ports are efficient,other two ports efficiency,varies over the years where these two particular ports display inefficiency in some years.The other additional five ports are inefficient.The findings of this research are that operational performance is influenced by port performance indicators a container has in total.The restraints of this research are that it only considered 6 performance indicators,thus did not consider all port performance indicators due to incompleteness of data available for other performance indicators.Another limitation is that the research only examined 13 ports for a period of 7 years due to limiting factors of unavailable data for other years.Further research on MSR could consider focusing on the various areas left out by this research.