Economic evaluation of the spanish port system using the promethee multicriteria decision method

Due to legislation changes during the Nineties, the Spanish Port System has gone through a series of changes that, simultaneous with a period of economic expansion and generalized marine traffic growth, have affected the Port System’s composition, organization and operation. The gradual transformations produced by this context, give shape to a new model of operation for Port Authorities, which now start to be managed under business criteria and procedures of functional autonomy, competition, effectiveness and profit, moving away from State dependency, and at the same time allowing greater participation of regional governments. As a result, general purpose Spanish ports develop their activity in a very competitive market, where self financing and financial sufficiency prevail as high-priority management goals. Our work considers these circumstances from the approach offered by multiple objective decision models, in order to study the performance evolution of Port Authorities, using certain ratios with economic meaning which will allow determining how their relative ranking within the national set has varied. The great variety of available business ratios and the different concepts to analyze give the problem a discrete multicriteria dimension. Thus we have chosen the Promethee method for our analysis, given its results simplicity and easy understanding for the decision agent, the economic interpretation of its parameters, and the stability of its results. In addition, scale effects between different alternatives are eliminated, allowing the possibility of incomparability among them and offering a sensitivity analysis of the effects.