A Generalized DEA Approach to Performance Assessment: Case Study of Northern Adriatic Ports

Ports are an important interface between inland and maritime transport. They also play an important role in increasing trade and economic growth of the country. Therefore, improving the efficiency of ports is crucial as it can boost a country’s competitiveness and economy. It also improves a country’s access to global markets, leading to growth in trade and consequently higher incomes. Improving the efficiency of ports and the maritime transport system is important to increase the EU’s competitiveness. Cargo volumes in the Adriatic ports of Central and Eastern European countries have increased in recent years. For this reason, the evaluation of ports in the Adriatic region is of particular importance. Current methodologies ignore the assessment in case of uncertainties. For this reason, the efficiency scores are not accurate enough to be used for improving port performance and, in general, they are not useful for port users. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to assess and measure the efficiency of the studied ports over the last two years. In this way, efficient and inefficient ports as well as the causes of inefficiency of each port will be identified. The evaluation is based on the ports’ operational capacity, which includes general cargo, vehicles, liquid bulk, containers and dry bulk. To assess the performance, this paper develops a model that takes into account undesirable inputs and outputs as well as uncertainties and estimates performance accordingly. In this paper, generalized non-classical DEA models are used. Therefore, the generalized fuzzy SBM model is used to evaluate the performance of the ports. The results of this project will help to improve the performance and efficiency of the studied ports. Policy makers can take the assessment results into account when deciding how to improve the European transport network and trade competitiveness.