Technical Efficiency Evaluation And Competition Analysis For Seaports Among Asian And Middle Eastern Countries:A Perspective Of Belt-and-Road Initiative

Port competition and cooperation plays a generous role in the port operations optimization.Subject to the prevailing conditions in a region,some ports may perform better in cooperation with other ports in the region.While,some may best perform if indulged in a competition with the neighboring ports for the same market of interest.In order to evaluate the level of success of a port in terms of its performance,it can be best evaluated by assessing its business share in the market structure,gain or loss of business to other ports with the passage of time its portfolio analysis.Portfolio analysis is a combined indication of a port’s growth and relative business share hold.Similarly,to estimate the performance of a port,it is vital to know how efficiently it is utilizing the resources it has been provided with.Which can be effectively determined by the technical efficiency analysis.Technical efficiency can be assessed through different ways.However,the most commonly employed and widely accepted method is the Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA).It evaluates the port performance in terms of how efficiently it uses the facilities and resources it has and also compares this with how the same resources have been used by some of the most successful ports considered in the study.The successful or efficient ports are used as benchmarks and the inefficient ports are further classified based on their future potential of performing better.The South Asian and Middle Eastern ports despite of its strategic value and market share have been less explored in the literature.This thesis is aimed at the competition,portfolio and market share of the most prominent ports along or adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz.It is one of the busiest straits in the world and its strategic value has enhanced with the initiation of BRI.This study will determine the performance of the ports under consideration on the basis of their business performance data from the year 2008-2017.This study indicates how the performance of various ports has changed with the passage of time subject to a range of reasons.In the current scenario,the ports of Dubai remained most successful from the perspective of its hold on the market along its growth.Similarly,Gwadar port trust remained the least successful in this domain.To further enlighten the performance of ports in the South Asian and Middle Eastern region,it was compared with the busiest and prominent ports of East Asia.A set 15 ports from each region were selected.Moreover,a range of factors and resources which are considered critical in a port operations were gathered for all these ports for the year of 2018 in the form of cross sectional data.It was assessed through the DEA-CCR model using MATLAB,Excel and a Chinese software.The results reveal that the Port of Lianyungang along Shanghai International Port Group and Busan New Container Port remained the most efficient ports with their highest business achievements and effective resource utilization.