Ports are being privatized in the belief that enterprise-based ports can react faster to global changes
and are therefore more efficient than public ports. In the past years many concessions have been
granted in order to privatize port facilities. However, if the public authorities and governments want to
obtain more benefits from these concessions, more insights into concession characteristics are needed
to develop more innovative contractual arrangements.
This thesis provides insights into the container terminal concessions by first investigating whether the
concessions lead to a better port performance and then focussing on two important characteristics of
container terminal concessions, namely the duration of the concessions and the private entities
participating in the concession. The port performance is measured in port throughput and in order to
get an unambiguous measurement the thesis focuses on one specific terminal. The focus is on
container terminals because containerized trade flows have increased rapidly in the last three decades,
implying that it is in an interesting market to observe. By utilizing a dynamic panel model, we try to
capture the short- and long-term effects of container terminal concessions on the port performance.
The dynamic panel model we used is the Bårdsen Error Correction Model. We estimate the Bårdsen
ECM with the Newey and West standard errors in order to correct for serial correlation and with the
Driscoll and Kraay standard errors in order to correct for serial correlation and cross-sectional
correlation. Only the use of Driscoll and Kraay estimators has shown a positive influence of
concessions on port throughput.