World Port Productivity and competition
By Ernesto Garcia-Marin
EGMConsult.com
This essay analyze roles of ownership, corporate structure, and inter-port competition. Conducts comprehensive analyses
on global seaport institutions and port infrastructure
productivity. It also examines the determinants of port output and the roles
port institutions play in driving port infrastructure productivity.
Specifically, the essay analyzes the roles of macro-, meso-,
and micro-levels of institutional features of ports (inter-port competition,
corporate structure, and port asset ownership practice). They are evaluated to
understand why ports have become productive over the last decade and
how those factors yield better opportunities for ports to prosper. While
influences from external environments are still one of the important factors in
shaping port efficiency, the roles of institutions play an increasingly
important role, especially in the management of ports over the medium-long
term. Furthermore, port efficiency has been shaped not only by macro-level
market institutions (i.e. inter-port competition) but also by the capacity of
port authorities to implement innovative institutional practices for port
ownership and capital asset management.
While port managing institutions maintain a close
relationship with their own historical trajectories, global container ports in
the contemporary era search for a strategic flexibility with institutional
bindings to respond to external challenges and to overcome their limitations.
This strategic flexibility can be partly achieved by “vertical unbundling” of
container terminal operation functions from the government’s hand and by
private sector participation for investment in port assets, i.e. concessions or
leases -institutional bindings based on neoclassical contracts.
From the view of regulators and policy makers, they should
focus their policy making on environmental, safety, and customs regulations.
They also need to create a competitive market to reduce oligopoly in the port
sector by adopting diverse policy mechanisms. Given the competitive market
structure, the business aspects of port operation can be better secured through
diverse institutional mechanisms of private sector participation.
From the view of planners in port authorities facing global
competition, the capacity of strategic planning to increase strategic
flexibility of ports based on medium-or long-term scenarios is essential to
achieve this institutional flexibility, thereby contributing to a higher
productivity level of leading ports. This is a critical time for port
authorities, managers, and policy makers to understand that they have a choice
in what roles to play with what kinds of policy tools under the global pressure
and rapidly transforming environments.
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