The technical efficiency of Norwegian container ports: A comparison to some Nordic and UK container ports using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)

In this article we evaluate the technical efficiency of Norwegian container ports relative to a frontier composed of the best performing among themselves and other comparable Nordic and UK ports. The rationale is that a technical efficiency assessment of Norwegian container ports has not been found in the literature; therefore, it is unknown what their potential for improvement relative to other comparable international ports is. A Data Envelopment Analysis is used to derive the technical and scale efficiencies. The data set comprises 24 container ports, which include ports from Norway, all the Nordic countries and the United Kingdom. The primary data were derived from various issues of Containerisation International Yearbook (CIY) and cover the period of 2002–2008. Besides the efficiency analysis, an effort was made to counter-check the CIYs data with the administrations of the respective container ports. This study concludes: (1) the average potentials for technical and scale efficiency improvement across ports and improvement during the period studied are 18 per cent and 13 per cent, respectively; (2) Norwegian ports are over-performers and under-performers with regard to technical and scale efficiency, respectively; (3) for Norwegian ports to improve their overall efficiency, they need to increase their size because they are too small relative to the tasks they perform; and (4) the data from the CIYs were found to be imprecise and unreliable in some cases.