Assessing Impact of Concessionaires on Sea Ports

Abstract

This study focuses on developing a model to measure the concessionaire impact on port performance and efficiency using the pre and post-privatization data. Parameters such as Crane rate, Elapsed rate, Total TEU and Ships handled were used as the variable for the assessment and the secondary data were collected from the BITRE (The Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport, and Regional Economics) website of the Australian government. The statistical report called 'Waterline' which is biannual publication made by BITRE provides the latest data available on stevedoring productivity and land-side performance of five Australian major port terminals: Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Fremantle for the period of 1990 to 2007. Thus, panel data was constructed to test the model and samples were drawn as panel data indicating 90 observations. The collected data was analyzed using Multiple Regression analysis to assess the impact of the concessionaire and used "Minitab 16" software as the analytical software. Analysis revealed a continuous improvement in the developed model and the findings of the research indicated that crane rate of ports with the concessionaire is higher than that of ports without concessionaire while that value of Elapsed rate was lower than that. That concluded ports with concessionaire demonstrate that efficiency of those ports is higher than that of ports without concessionaire in terms of crane rate. But it's not with the elapsed rate. From observation in this study, a decision can be made that the increased trend in transferring government port operations and the asset to the private sector suggests that public ports can benefit from greater private sector participation than full privatization.