Journal of
Economics and International Finance

  • Abbreviation: J. Econ. Int. Finance
  • Language: English
  • ISSN: 2006-9812
  • DOI: 10.5897/JEIF
  • Start Year: 2009
  • Published Articles: 366

Article in Press

The technical efficiency of Tunisian ports: Comparing data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis scores

Rabeb kammoun

  •  Received: 14 June 2018
  •  Accepted: 14 June 2018
Maritime transportation for Tunisia plays an important role in trade exchange with other countries. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to measure the efficiency scores of 7 seaports in Tunisia by applying the Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) with Cobb-Douglas production function and data envelopment analysis (DEA) with CCR and BCC models. The annual data collected cover the 2003 to 2013 period for each port. Thus, the sample size for the analysis comprises a total of 77 observations. The empirical result shows that the total average scores of operating efficiency scores were DEABCC (0.746)>SFACD (0.536)>DEACCR (0.334) from 2003 to 2013. Given these results, the port of Rades can be considered as the best efficient port in the 2 models (DEABCC, SFACD). Based on the DEACCR results, the port of Gabes is defined as the only efficient one for this set of samples, so one concludes that the port of Gabes can be considered as the best efficient port by using the DEABCC, DEACCR and SFACD models.

Keywords: Efficiency, data envelopment analysis (DEA), stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), Tunisian seaports.