Governance And Comparative Performance Of Iberian Peninsula Seaports. An Application Of Non-Parametric Techniques

Iberian Peninsula seaports have been characterized by a growing development. However, due to the geographical position of Portugal and Spain their seaports were supposed to have a more important role in Europe and simultaneously it was also expected that it would have encouraged competition between the two countries. This reality increases the interest of measuring their performance. Therefore, this research presents the major features of Iberian seaports, analyses their governance model and evaluates their inefficiency. It is based on the non-parametric frontier technique of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and on a bootstrap resampling method. The benchmarking results showed considerable inefficiency in a sample of 33 seaports of the Iberian Peninsula. Although none of the countries highlighted outstanding efficiency, some relevant conclusions can be drawn from the study. Indeed, everything points out to the fact that the high scores of inefficiency in these countries are influenced not only by mismanagement or lack of incentives but also by a harmful political interference, labour problems and/or low disposability to expand the seaports areas.