Comparative Efficiency of Container Ports in Vietnam and Korea

Currently, there are very few papers that have examined the efficiency of Vietnamese ports. Of those that have, some of them take into account only a few container ports in Northern Vietnam. Others focus on comparing all types of ports in Vietnam with regard to the differences in efficiency scores when applying different methods to evaluate efficiency. However, there is no paper that specifically analyzes the efficiency of Vietnamese container ports throughout the country or that compares Vietnamese container ports with those of other countries in terms of efficiency. In order to provide more accurate and interesting information for container port authorities, in this study, 21 major Vietnamese container ports and seven major Korean container ports are selected and examined with regard to their levels of efficiency in 2016 using data envelopment analysis (DEA). This paper applies both constant return to scale (CRS) and variable return to scale (VRS) to explore the differences among overall technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency, and scale efficiency of the selected container ports. This study also indicate slacks and sets projections for inefficient ports.