Analysis Of Container Traffic Throughput The Port And Evaluation Of Services Performance At The Port Of Cotonou

Ports in west Africa are considered to be an important part of economies of the countries.They are service providers and must not incur any operational loss due to poor management.Because of to the complexity and the variety of services ports,in which often require fast management decisions,it is thus "crucial to provide the port management with reports and analyses about the operational performance on a regular basis.The port of cotonou located in benin,is currently one the lest efficient ports in west africa due to many reasons related to its perfonnance.Although he pocesses many advanges and potentialities that the others do not have.Therefore some mesures has recently been taken by the excutives in charge to enlarge and modernize the port in order to boost its performance and competitivity on the market.However all these actions seems to be insufficient.this current state of port causes ports managers and investors to enquires more studies related to the determinants factors influencing the port of cotonou performance in order to figure out helpful countenneasures.This paper provides not only an assessment of the causes related to port of Cotonou weaknesses through a survey analysis,but also an evaluation of container traffic troughput of the port using a multilinear regression analysis.This assessment revealed that insufficiency of working staff,mismanagement of port area,mismanagement of time,insufficiency of dry ports and finally a poor public private partnerships are the main factors affecting port of Cotonou performance.Additionally the results of the regression anlysis showed that there are three others factors that affect the port operational performance which are the related employment,the ships processing time and the container processing time.This analysis enable us to define a containers demand function and forecast the containers troughtput for any coming years.With this prediction function,the managers of the port of Cotonou could predict the containers throughput outcomes that they will have to dealt with for any coming years and consequently take necessary measures in order to achieve a high level of performance.