With the globalisation of the world economy, the container port industry is becoming
increasingly important. This research is motivated by the contrast between the ever mounting
importance of the contemporary container port industry and the sparsity of
scientific and in-depth research of the economic theories that underpin it. Despite the
paramount importance of the container port industry for globalisation and international
trade, many fundamental economic theories underpinning the container port production
remain unknown and deserve to be thoroughly investigated. From a theoretical point of
view, very few attempts have thus far been made to apply traditional economic theories
to the container port industry.
This research is also motivated by the vital role played by efficiency measurement in any
sort of production and the dearth of such studies in the container port industiy.
Traditional approaches are confined to partial measures o f productivity and not
sophisticated enough to reflect the complexity of contemporary container port production
and to provide enough insights on management or policy implications. In recent years,
two leading approaches to measuring efficiency, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and
Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA), have been occasionally applied to ports or to the
container port industry in order to measure their efficiency. However, the extant research
in this aspect is far from sufficient. Among other reasons, the existing corpus of research
is either based on strong assumptions, or has ignored the great variety and diverse nature
of the available data (such as cross-sectional or longitudinal data)