Productivity changes in Taiwan's port industry incorporating environmental regulations on harbor water quality

Abstract This paper evaluates the productivity changes in Taiwan's port industry for the period 2003–2007. Based on a ‘three-year-window’ data envelopment analysis method, Luenberger productivity indicators are employed to estimate the productivity changes that account for the success of attempts by port agents to control harbor water quality. This is one of the typical environmental concerns in port operations that prior studies on port productivity changes over time have not considered. The results show that the productivity of Taiwan's port industry has experienced growth over the study period, regardless of whether water quality has been considered or not. At a disaggregated level, however, if a port agent has succeeded in controlling water quality, but we do not consider it, the results will misclassify the agent by understating the port's productivity.

[1]  Moshe Kim,et al.  The Structure of Production, Technical Change and Productivity in a Port , 1986 .

[2]  Shunsuke Managi,et al.  Regulatory reforms and productivity : an empirical analysis of the Japanese electricity industry , 2008 .

[3]  Pablo Coto-Millán,et al.  Economic efficiency in Spanish ports: some empirical evidence , 2000 .

[4]  H Journee,et al.  Survey on environmental monitoring requirements of European ports. , 2009, Journal of environmental management.

[5]  Ming-Miin Yu,et al.  Assessment of airport performance using the SBM-NDEA model , 2010 .

[6]  Lourdes Trujillo,et al.  Efficiency measurement in the port industry: a survey of the empirical evidence , 2009 .

[7]  Lourdes Trujillo,et al.  Sources of efficiency gains in port reform: a DEA decomposition of a Malmquist TFP index for Mexico , 2004 .

[8]  Jose L. Tongzon,et al.  Efficiency measurement of selected Australian and other international ports using data envelopment analysis , 2001 .

[9]  Mette Asmild,et al.  Economic versus environmental improvement potentials of Danish pig farms , 2006 .

[10]  D. Luenberger.  Benefit functions and duality , 1992 .

[11]  D. Primont,et al.  Multi-Output Production and Duality: Theory and Applications , 1994 .

[12]  John J. Liu,et al.  Assessing container operator efficiency with heterogeneous and time-varying production frontiers , 2009 .

[13]  Somchai Pathomsiri,et al.  Impact of undesirable outputs on the productivity of US airports , 2008 .

[14]  Le Xuan Quynh,et al.  Water management in the framework of environmental management systems in Bulgarian seaports , 2011 .

[15]  S. Grosskopf,et al.  PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IN APEC COUNTRIES , 1996 .

[16]  Dong-Wook Song,et al.  Evaluating impacts of institutional reforms on port efficiency changes: Ownership, corporate structure, and total factor productivity changes of world container ports , 2010 .

[17]  P. Ji,et al.  An Application of DEA Windows Analysis to Container Port Production Efficiency , 2004 .

[18]  Timothy Coelli,et al.  An Introduction to Efficiency and Productivity Analysis , 1997 .

[19]  Theo Notteboom,et al.  Measuring and Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Container Terminals by Means of Bayesian Stochastic Frontier Models , 2000 .

[20]  J. Pastor,et al.  Measuring macroeconomic performance in the OECD: A comparison of European and non-European countries , 1995 .

[21]  K. Cullinane,et al.  The Efficiency of European Container Terminals and Implications for Supply Chain Management , 2006 .

[22]  T. Coelli,et al.  The Effect of Incentive Reforms Upon Productivity: Evidence from the Vietnamese Rice Industry , 2002 .

[23]  William L. Weber,et al.  Productivity and efficiency in the trucking industry: Accounting for traffic fatalities , 2004 .

[24]  R. Morrison,et al.  Changes in the marine environment of Port Kembla Harbour, NSW, Australia, 1975-1995: a review. , 2001, Marine pollution bulletin.

[25]  R. Färe,et al.  Benefit and Distance Functions , 1996 .

[26]  Eduardo Martínez-Budría,et al.  A STUDY OF THE EFFICIENCY OF SPANISH PORT AUTHORITIES USING DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS , 1999 .

[27]  R. Chambers.  Exact nonradial input, output, and productivity measurement , 2002 .

[28]  Anthony T.H. Chin,et al.  Port performance in Asia: Does production efficiency imply environmental efficiency? , 2010 .

[29]  R. Shepherd.  Theory of cost and production functions , 1970 .

[30]  A. Hailu,et al.  Non‐Parametric Productivity Analysis with Undesirable Outputs: An Application to the Canadian Pulp and Paper Industry , 2001 .

[31]  F. Hosseinzadeh Lotfi,et al.  Undesirable inputs and outputs in DEA models , 2005, Appl. Math. Comput..

[32]  Kevin Cullinane,et al.  A stochastic frontier model of the efficiency of major container terminals in Asia: assessing the influence of administrative and ownership structures , 2002 .

[33]  Y Roll,et al.  Port performance comparison applying data envelopment analysis (DEA) , 1993 .

[34]  Ming-Miin Yu,et al.  Technical efficiency and impact of environmental regulations in farrow‐to‐finish swine production in Taiwan , 2008 .

[35]  R. Färe,et al.  Profit, Directional Distance Functions, and Nerlovian Efficiency , 1998 .

[36]  Carlos Pestana Barros,et al.  Incentive Regulation and Efficiency of Portuguese Port Authorities , 2003 .

[37]  Michael Norman,et al.  Data Envelopment Analysis: The Assessment of Performance , 1991 .

[38]  Cherdvong Saengsupavanich,et al.  Environmental performance evaluation of an industrial port and estate: ISO14001, port state control-derived indicators , 2009 .

[39]  Emilio Galdeano-Gómez,et al.  Productivity effects of environmental performance: evidence from TFP analysis on marketing cooperatives , 2008 .

[40]  Ben Longstaff,et al.  Development and evaluation of a spatially-explicit index of Chesapeake Bay health. , 2009, Marine pollution bulletin.

[41]  C.A.K. Lovell,et al.  Multilateral Productivity Comparisons When Some Outputs are Undesirable: A Nonparametric Approach , 1989 .

[42]  C. Barros,et al.  Comparing Productivity Change in Italian and Portuguese Seaports using the Luenberger Indicator Approach , 2007 .

[43]  Rong-Her Chiu,et al.  The liberalization of shipping in Taiwan , 2007 .

[44]  Ludwig Lauwers,et al.  Environmental efficiency measurement and the materials balance condition , 2007 .

[45]  Shlomo Bekhor,et al.  GEV-based destination choice models that account for unobserved similarities among alternatives , 2008 .

[46]  Martin Dresner,et al.  NORTH AMERICAN CONTAINERPORT PRODUCTIVITY: 1984-1997 , 2004 .

[47]  Lourdes Trujillo,et al.  Reforms and Infrastructure Efficiency in Spain's Container Ports , 2005 .

[48]  D. Luenberger.  New optimality principles for economic efficiency and equilibrium , 1992 .

[49]  S. Grosskopf,et al.  PRODUCTIVITY CHANGE IN SWEDISH PHARMACIES 1980–1989: A NONPARAMETRIC MALMQUIST APPROACH , 1992 .

[50]  Rulon D. Pope,et al.  Aggregate Productivity Measures , 1996 .

[51]  M. Farrell.  The Measurement of Productive Efficiency , 1957 .

[52]  Kevin Cullinane,et al.  The technical efficiency of container ports: Comparing data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis , 2006 .

[53]  R. Färe,et al.  Productivity changes in Swedish pharamacies 1980–1989: A non-parametric Malmquist approach , 1992 .

[54]  Rolf Färe,et al.  Productivity and Undesirable Outputs: A Directional Distance Function Approach , 1995 .

[55]  Jose L. Tongzon,et al.  Systematizing international benchmarking for ports , 1995 .

[56]  Lawrence M. Seiford,et al.  Modeling undesirable factors in efficiency evaluation , 2002, Eur. J. Oper. Res..