OECS Ports : An Efficiency and Performance Assessment

Cubas, Diana ; Briceno-Garmendia, Cecilia ; Bofinger, Heinrich C.

World Bank Group, Washington, DC

关键词: AIR;    AIR TRANSPORT;    AIRPORTS;    AUTOMOBILES;    BERTH;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-7162
RP-ID  :  WPS7162

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Handling charges in Caribbean ports aretwo to three times higher than in similar ports in otherregions of the world. In some cases, it costs significantlyless to ship a container to Hong Kong SAR, China, or Europethan it does to ship to a neighboring island no more than100 miles away. The reasons for high port-handling costs arelinked to procedural inefficiencies along the logisticschain, high freight rates that shipping lines attribute toempty backhauls, and the poor performance of port managementand operations. The Organization of Eastern Caribbean Statesshares the larger Caribbean region's advantages,challenges, and concerns related to the performance of portmanagement and operations. Yet performance assessments havebeen difficult to make because of data constraints. Thisreport seeks to provide such an assessment along fourdistinct policy dimensions: (i) traffic development, (ii)the institutional and regulatory framework, (iii)infrastructure development, and (iv) performance, includingpricing and finance issues. The report concludes bybenchmarking the efficiency of Organization of EasternCaribbean States ports against other Latin American portsusing a stochastic frontier approach, and providing a listof next steps for further research and policyprioritization. To make the current analysis possible, arigorous exercise in the collection of primary data wasconducted, using standardized templates adapted specificallyto the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States context. Thecollection of data proved to be particularly difficult onfinancial and performance metrics, since many of the portslack strong statistical systems and institutions.