Evaluation Of The Efficiency Of The Main Inland Container Ports In China

In recent years,with the rise of shipping industry and container industry in China,inland container transport format has been deeply developed.As a container and ship gathering place,inland container port is not only the core hub of inland container transport system,but also the core link of container transport system operation and management.Its efficiency directly affects the efficiency of inland container transport system.However,with the deepening of the opening up of cities along the inland river and the intensification of the industrial agglomeration effect,the growth of foreign trade goods within the container,the trend of large-scale development of ships and the limitation of waterway level bring challenges to the operation and management of the existing inland container transport system.At the same time,the low level of management technology,the government or port state-owned enterprises monopoly lead to waste of inland container port resources and lack of core competitiveness.In order to overcome the bottleneck problem of insufficient productivity,China’s inland container port is in urgent need to take the sustainable development way of resource efficient allocation and economize,and optimize the allocation of port resources from the level of the whole port logistics system.Therefore,the efficiency,influencing factors and influencing degree of inland container port in China have become an important issue to be studied urgently.Firstly,from the point of view of the port itself,this paper uses the traditional DEA model to evaluate the efficiency of China’s main inland container ports from 2011-2015,and finds that the comprehensive technical efficiency of China’s inland container ports is low,mainly due to low pure technical efficiency and low scale efficiency.At the same time,We establish a matrix graph of container throughput and super-efficiency which take the average value of container throughput and super-efficiency DEA efficiency as coordinate axis,and classify the ports according to the distribution of the ports in the matrix graph,it is found that nearly half of the ports belong to thin ports,so we give different suggestions for different ports to improving the efficiency.Then we use the malquist model to explore the current situation of dynamic efficiency and future productivity development trend of inland container ports in China.the results show that the overall productivity of major inland container ports in China presents a downward trend from 2011-2015.Managers should pay attention to the need to plan for the future while pursuing the present high efficiency.Next,we establish the DEA-tobit regression model to explore which factors affect the efficiency of China’s inland container port and the extent of its impact,including two aspects,one is the port’s internal investment and output factors,other is the port’s external environmental factors.It is found that the internal output variable has more contributions to the port efficiency.The external aspect is mainly freight demand and the degree of opening to the outside world which has a greater impact,the level of economic development is difficult to reflect the greater impact in the short term;Because of the particularity of inland container transportation,road transportation has less threat to inland container port competition.Finally,the paper establishes a three-stage DEA model with SFA,which aims to explore how do the external environmental factors affect the port efficiency,eliminat the impact of external environmental factors and random interference on the port by using the three stage DEA,and simply study the efficiency status of inland container port from the perspective of management.By comparing the efficiency values of the first and third stages,it is found that the low scale efficiency is the main reason for the low comprehensive technical efficiency,and the diseconomy of port scale severely restricts the development of inland container ports in China.Based on the above empirical analysis,this paper puts forward suggestions on improving the efficiency of container port from both macro and micro aspects.