Container terminals play a central role in the global distribution of goods, as essential elements in most supply chains. Container handling in Brazilian terminals has been growing in the past five years. So, given the importance of container handling activity for Brazilian economy, it is relevant to study how the resources are used and also the efficiency of these terminals. This paper evaluates the technical and financial efficiencies of Brazilian container terminals. Initially, bibliographic research was done to understand the handling activities of container terminals, the financial and technical efficiency concepts and the variables related to them. After that, the data were gathered based in reports by port authorities and the technical and financial efficiency were calculated for Brazilian public container terminals. Tecon Santos, Convicon, Tecondi, Rodrimar, Libra Rio, Sepetiba Tecon, Tecon Rio Grande and Tecon Salvador were selected for this study due to the data availability. At the end, we established the technical and financial efficiency rankings enabling comparison of these two types of efficiency for each terminal. Besides this, the terminals' breakeven points were calculated. The data indicate that the terminals with best technical efficiency are not necessarily those with best financial efficiency and vice versa. This paper is relevant since it allows identifying terminals' weaknesses, making it possible to develop actions to improve their performance. Besides that, it helps decision-makers to manage future investments and improvement actions.
Road safety is a global health problem and its severity in developing countries highlights the need for research to address its causes. We explore the effect of institutional variables on road safety, redressing the literature's failure to consider political institutions as road safety determinants. Specifically, we analyze the effect on traffic accidents and fatalities of different political regimes, electoral rules and forms of government.By drawing on an international sample of countries taken over a long time-span, we implement panel data methods to empirically estimate the role of institutions on road safety determinants.We find that democratic institutions are associated with better road safety outcomes. The beneficial effects of democratization become apparent after about four years in countries undergoing a regime transition and are also discernible in established democracies that are consolidating their political institutions. Finally, our results suggest that road safety can be characterized as a local public good and that its provision is greater in parliamentary systems.This paper is the first empirical paper shedding light on the role of institutions to road safety outcomes. Our results provide evidence of how the democratization of countries involve positive externalities to road safety outcomes.
In recent years the role of sustainable and alternative transportation concepts has significantly grown in importance due to increasing freight transport volumes, congested roads and intensifying environmental problems. Various industries understand inter modal transportation as a solution and feasible alternative to unimodal road transportation, as it combines the strengths of different transportation modes. Long-haul transportation that usually is carried out by rail or waterborne transportation represents a key feature of intermodal transport chains distinguishing them from unimodal transport chains. However, so far there has been no systematic analysis of the effect of long-haul transportation on the performance of an intermodal transport chain in terms of transportation time and transport time reliability. The aim of this paper is therefore to analyze and evaluate the effect of long-haul transportation on performance by proposing an analytical and a simulation model. The analysis contributes to a better understanding of impacts resulting from different modal shares as well as influencing variables and enables to derive recommendations for future transport planning.
The last mile has been characterised as the most expensive and complicated part of the supply chain, featuring negative impacts on pollution and congestion in densely populated areas. The arrival of e-commerce has accentuated the number of individual home deliveries, increasing the flows in the last-mile. Investigating how to improve the efficiency of logistics in urban areas is a major driver for the success of e-commerce, and contributes to alleviating the negative externalities of urban freight transport derived from it.By means of interviews and empirical analysis, this article targets two goals. Firstly, to conciliate different perspectives about the structure and cost drivers in the market. Secondly, within this framework, to propose a cost model for two of the most popular methods of last-mile delivery: the home delivery and delivery through pick-up points.Main findings: It is concluded that the parcel delivery market remains under a strong competition, driven by efficiency and with little space for innovations. Parcel delivery companies have been handling with failed deliveries via different solutions. While failed deliveries have an impact on the cost structure, achieving higher economies of density has a higher impact on costs reduction. Pick-up points offer a solution to failed deliveries while they increase the density of deliveries at the same time. When the number of parcels to the pick-up point is high enough, benefits for both logistics carriers and the society are achieved. This is due to the reductions in the overall number of vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT). Results show that reductions-can be obtained with a limited number of pick-up points.In this paper, a novel typology of the B2C logistics sector is presented together with the most important cost drivers for the sector. In the analysis, an original cost model incorporates cost drivers disregarded in previous modelling efforts, such as the failed deliveries, the modal choice of companies and customers and the stoppage time of a delivery. Furthermore, primary data were obtained to develop the calculations and the results were validated by companies of the sector.
Consistently with extant management literature, a high quality mission statement is crucial for formulating, implementing and evaluating business strategy. Despite the considerable attention awarded to this theme, the role and quality of mission statements in the strategic management of tourism firms has not been sufficiently highlighted. The present paper aims therefore at bridging this literature gap, by assessing the quality of cruise line mission statements, considering that, to the best of our knowledge, a relevant systematic study does not exist yet.We employ three measures of "quality" derived from previous literature: (1) inclusion of stakeholder groups; (2) mention of specific "mission" components (Target/Customers/Segments; Products; Location; Technology; Concern For Survival; Philosophy; Self Concept; Concern For Public Image; Concern For Employees); (3) reference to the four goals assigned to mission statements: disclosure of the sense of future direction, definition of control mechanism, decision making guide, and a motivation tool for employees. We apply the content analysis methods to analyze the mission statements of 44 cruise lines operating in the Standard/Ocean and Luxury/Niche market segments.The results suggest that the statements fall short of meeting the quality criteria suggested by the academic literature. Variations from the "ideal" and high quality missions are discussed. Limited differences also emerge between firms belonging to the two cruise market segments.This contribution presents some valuable research implications, useful for researchers and academics, but also professionals and investors may benefit from this knowledge.
Although Brazilian Government has been releasing some public policies in order to improve the competitiveness of transport sector, e.g. National Plan for Logistics and Transportation, this sector is still subjected to excessive logistics costs. Thus, the logistics integration centers (LICs) show up as an attractive option to attaining efficient intermodal transportation. Therefore, this paper aims to apply the mixed integer linear programming model of Guimaraes (2015) to the Brazilian soybean flows (considering the PNLT origin-destination matrix), in order to evaluated if (and what extend) the transportation costs would decrease if LICs were available. This model aims to minimize the total cost of transport, strictly satisfying the peer-to-peer demand. At the end, we could point out the best locations for soybean LICs and their capacities, helping the decision-maker to define the operational structures of LICs as well as their feasibility studies. Besides, we could estimate the monetary savings implied by the LICs usage, under the database considered.
contract adaptation is usually unavoidable in the transportation industry. However, the existing literature suggests nothing to constrain ex post strategic behavior of contractors except the reputation mechanism. This paper uncovers a complementary vehicle: an ex post incentive payment mechanism for contract adaptation. The incentive payment mechanism contributes to the regulatory literature in the transportation industry, by providing a method to prevent ex post strategic behavior of the contractor. After relaxing the traditional assumption that contract adaptation is exogenous, we show that the government will undertake a higher payment for cost-saving efficiency that also brings a higher ex post economic profit to the contractor. Using highway paving contracts of California Department of Transportation, we provide evidence of a positive relationship between ex post economic profit and ex post payment. Our results are robust to different types of contract adaptation.
The main purpose of this paper is to examine the economic effects of seaports infrastructure investment (SIT) on Tunisia's economic sectors (i.e., manufacturing, agriculture, and services) from 1983 to 2011. Based on the production function approach, we assumed that there are three types of production factors: capital stock, labor force, and seaports capital stock. The functional form of the Cobb -Douglass production function is used in this study. Empirical results confirm the existence of the positive economic effects of the seaports' investments in Tunisia's economic growth. They also show an unequal distribution of the positive economic effects regarding the country's economic sectors. In addition, they revealed that SII seems to be even more beneficial to the services sector than the manufacturing sector. These results are very important for decision makers for developing a policy for the seaports and avoiding the unequal distribution of the economic benefits between the country's economic sectors.
This paper analyzes the dynamic relationship between Mexican air transport expansion and economic growth. To this end, non-parametric cointegration techniques and non-parametric causality tests are introduced and applied to quarterly data of GDP and number of air passengers in Mexico for the period 1995-2013. These procedures allow to test the existence of long run relationship between the variables and to decide whether the model is linear or not. The empirical results show the existence of a cointegration relationship between air transport and economic growth, and that this relationship is linear. In addition, the nonparametric causality tests confirm bidirectional causality between transport and growth.
The use of public transport is linked to many aspects of city life and its inhabitants and, as in a spider's web, each strand is part of a system and exists only if there is a system as a whole. In Italy it has been long discussed to encourage the use of local public transport (LPT) through improvements to LPT quality after historically supporting it with the low price allowed by heavy subsidies and the design of urban mobility as a whole has been neglected, missing the goal of increasing the number of passengers.This paper intends to build an Index of perceived quality of LPT and investigate its relations with the use and satisfaction with ticket price in the twenty Italian Regions. The study also presents an analysis of the subsisting correlations between the Index of perceived quality, the use of LPT and satisfaction with the price paid for the service provided by public transport companies.This work takes into account both objective and subjective aspects of the service, through user perceptions (customer-based approach), because the assessment of the quality of the service through the user's eyes is considered essential for the implementation of any strategy aimed at increasing or consolidating the use of LPT.In order to measure the quality perceived by users recourse is made to an index constructed on the basis of selected variables from the latest Istat Multi-purpose Survey "Aspects of daily life".' The index is obtained through the aggregation of individual indicators and by comparing the methodology known in the literature as the Borda index and factor analysis. The results confirm a low correlation between LPT quality and its utilization, although Italian LPT policies seem to neglect this evidence.The research shows: (i) a low correlation between the perceived quality of LPT and its utilization; (ii) the user satisfaction for the ticket price is however quite varied at the national level and does not seem to respond to particular spatial criteria (North/South) or to size; (iii) the improve of the performance of LPT by improving LPT alone is an ineffective endeavour.
Investments in transport infrastructure projects, and specifically in toll motorway concessions, are associated with a high degree of uncertainty and require a large amount of resources. The estimate of the net present value of the project involves discounting future revenues at a given discount rate, which can lead to mistaken results when the project implies a certain degree of flexibility.In such cases, methods for the valuation of the investments based on the real options theory allow to estimate the value of projects in an uncertain environment, adding the value of the administrative, operative and managerial flexibility to the strictly financial valuation of the traditional methods.In this paper, the options theory has been applied to the specific case of the abandonment option in a toll motorway concession project. For this purpose, the traffic of the motorway has been considered as the underlying asset to carry out a valuation based on the analogy with the financial options. This methodology is then applied to a case study of a real concession in Madrid, Spain. The results show a significant value of the abandonment option that represents an implicit aid from the Public Administration to the project.
Transport systems are vital to remote Australia's communities and enterprises. Supplying small and scattered population centres with transport infrastructure and services over great distances and in extreme climatic conditions for areas characterised by high supply chain costs and low median incomes represents a considerable challenge. Yet transport costs are underexplored in remote Australia. This article aims at studying the specificities of transport costs in remote Australia including a comprehensive evaluation of transport externalities. A methodological framework specific to the remote Australian context is designed and used to classify well -established secondary data. The sampling includes eight sites across remote Australia reflecting a wide range of communities in terms of population sizes and geographic conditions. Transport costs are then evaluated for different modes. The results are discussed and identify a critical aspect of transport systems characterising of remote Australia: not having access to effective transport magnifies externalities. In this sense the research shows the real magnitude of the current transport disadvantage currently affecting a large number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living remotely. Furthermore studying externalities can successfully provide some quantitative indication of accessibility costs. Eventually it illustrates the complex hierarchy of transport access which defines the geography of remote regions: monetised indicators could be used to determine remoteness level as opposed to some of the stereotyping linear formulas currently used derived from distances or population centre size.
In this study we estimate a production frontier for a sample of Italian container terminals observed over the period 2001-2008 in order to assess the pattern of Total Factor Productivity (TFP). Estimates of different stochastic frontier models suggest the existence of a modest but positive TFP growth rate over the period 2001-07 and an abrupt fall in TFP in 2008, which probably reflects the onset of the 2008-9 world recession. We also find that scale economies and technical change have positively contributed to TFP growth over the sample period; in turn, all models find a decline in technical efficiency. Finally, the different stochastic frontier methods considered in this paper give a broadly consistent picture of the productivity and efficiency developments that have occurred in this sample.
The Port of Tarifa is located in the Strait of Gibraltar and is the Iberian Peninsula’s southernmost town. The port is operated by the Algeciras Bay Port Authority and currently handles more than a million passengers annually with fast ferries to the Moroccan Port of Tangier. The port authority has planned an expansion of the port in 2015 aimed at tripling the current number of passengers and capturing a larger volume of the roll-on roll-off (ro-ro) traffic. The purpose of this paper is to estimate both current economic impact of the Port of Tarifa in 2007 and forecast its future economic impact following the planned expansion in 2015.
The award of the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics to Oliver Williamson for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm highlights the importance now attached to the new institutional economics. The amount of work on transportation organizations explicitly using the tools of new institutional economics is, however, sparse and there is a tendency to continue to rely exclusively on conventional neo-classical economic orthodoxy. But the role of such things as governance, transactions costs, social norms, moral hazard, adverse selection, and property rights are clearly important in the ways that transportation organizations function and interact with one another. This paper looks, as an example, at some of situations where the NIE may shed light on the behavior of various organizations that supply or regulate air transportation services under a variety of institutional conditions. In the NIE, institutions are the "rules of the game", consisting of both the formal legal rules and the informal social norms that govern individual behavior and structure social interactions whereas, organizations are those groups of people, and the governance arrangements they create, when coordinating their team actions against other teams performing also as organizations. For example, one can think of how the Ryanair "organization" acts in relations to other airline "organizations" within the existing set of legal "institutions" established by the European Union, or why airlines like United and Continental merge and the form mergers take.
The cruise industry has recently witnessed considerable growth, during which time the Mediterranean Basin and, in particular, the Italian area has gained an increasingly competitive position. A significant role in the investment and management decisions and in the level of efficiency and performance of terminal cruise operations is played by the possible partnerships between private and public actors (port authorities, cruise terminals, cruise line companies). The aim of this paper is to measure the technical efficiency of Italian cruise terminals in the Mediterranean Basin when public and private actors participate in the management of terminals. Cruise terminal efficiency is measured by the calculation of the production function with multi-outputs. We apply stochastic frontier analysis based on the distance function. The study shows that the partnership between private and public (with a strong private management component) has a positive impact on the technical efficiency of the cruise terminals.
This paper analyses the efficiency of Spanish seaports using the Free Disposal Hull (FDH) methodology and presents a method for ranking the evaluated units. Nonparametric frontier methods, as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and FDH, have been applied to the efficiency analysis of decision making units (DMUs). Despite the greater popularity of DEA relative to FDH, this last method nevertheless enables a comparison to be directly made between observed ports, whereas traditional DEA only enables comparisons between the frontier projections. The main disadvantage of FDH methodology is the observation of many efficient units, which makes it difficult to obtain a hierarchal ranking. This paper solves this problem and presents a new method for ranking the efficiency of the seaports with FDH methodology.
This paper uses an attribute-based stated choice experiment with a design adopted from Hensher's Design of Designs study, originally implemented in Australia, to investigate the role, in Taiwan, of the numbers of alternatives, choice sets, attributes, attribute levels, and the range of attribute levels, on choice response and implied willingness to pay for specific attributes in the context of car commuter choice of route. Computer-assisted personal interviews were conducted in Taichung City, Taiwan, to solicit data on commuter route choices. A series of multinomial logit models were estimated to investigate the effects of design dimensions on car commuters' willingness to pay (WTP) for travel time savings and reduced time variability. A comparison is also made between the findings from Taichung, Taiwan and Sydney, Australia, providing insights into differences in the role of each design dimension and consequent WTP estimates between Taichung City and Sydney.
This paper empirically analyzes changes in the supply of non-stop intercontinental flights from European airports. The research takes advantage of OAG data for air services from a rich sample of European airports to intercontinental destinations in the period 2004-2008. The data indicates a tendency towards a more balanced distribution of intercontinental flights across European airports. Results of the empirical analysis show that the largest hubs have lost market share in the considered period, after controlling for several attributes of the region, congestion, and number of nearby airports.
The '100% scanning' law, or House Resolution One (H R 1), aims to protect US territory against terrorist risks likely to affect the global logistics chain A unilateral step, It may be perceived as a disguised protectionist measure which would transfer the risk of 'seacurity' to its partners, particularly if the principle of reciprocity does not apply In this changing economic (over 400 million containers handled, under 0 5% of which are currently scanned) and regulatory context (following the SAFE framework of standards developed by the World Customs Organization), this paper provides an analysis of the likely impacts of this law The first part begins by examining the reactions to the introduction of the law and we draw upon official and operational responses to the scanning requirements from several international bodies, especially a survey of a sample of port authorities that the authors undertook for the WCO which focuses on an appraisal of the global cost of a scanned container and we broaden this evidence by considering the actual patterns of US trade The second part leads to six scenarios based on the preceding macro- and micro-economic results combining three dimensions infrastructure investments, technology and productivity of human resources
