Maritime Transport Costs and Port Efficiency

Clark, Ximena ; Dollar, David ; Micco, Alejandro

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: MARITIME SERVICES;    TRANSPORT COSTS;    PORT MANAGEMENT;    EFFICIENCY;    TRADE BARRIERS;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-2781
RP-ID  :  WPS2781

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Recent literature has emphasized theimportance of transport costs and infrastructure inexplaining trade, access to markets, and increases in percapita income. For most Latin American countries transportcosts are a greater barrier to U.S. markets than importtariffs. The authors investigate the determinants of thecosts of shipping to the United States using a largedatabase (more than 300,000 observations a year) onshipments of products at the six-digit level of theHarmonized System of classification from different portsaround the world. They find that distance andcontainerization matter. They find that the efficiency ofports is also important. Improving the efficiency of a portfrom the 25th to the 75th percentile reduces shipping costsby 12 percent. (On average, having bad ports is equivalentto being 60 percent farther away from markets.) Inefficientports also increase handling costs, which are part ofshipping costs. Finally, the authors try to explainvariations in port efficiency. They find that the variationsare linked to excessive regulation, the prevalence oforganized crime, and the general condition of thecountry's infrastructure.