A competitive analysis of EU ports by fixing spatial and economic dimensions

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiencies of ten of the leading European ports. The motivation of the research refers to the relevant topic of selection of indicators that can be involved in the comparative analysis. Concerning the theoretical model, the authors’ efforts are especially directed towards the usage of the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and of the data envelopment analysis (DEA). These techniques have been widely adopted for benchmarking and performance evaluation by involving indicators based on data from National Accounts. If one of these indicators, such as labour force consistency, is not available at a specific level of aggregation, detailed assumptions are needed to address this complication. The present study proposes an additive model in order to provide an estimation of ports’ economic activities by fixing the port activity boundaries and the spatial perimeter of the firms investigated. Several NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) levels and NACE (EU Statistical Classification of Economic Activities) codes are fixed to offer a useful comparable labour indicator. Empirical results reveal that each port area presents a combination of the NACE categories which significantly impact the efficiency that can reach very high performance values through both the SFA and DEA techniques. Since the managers can choose which sectors to improve, which particular improvement strategies to support, which specific service to add, their decisions impact this performance evaluation, and their performance can be verified through the approaches proposed.