DEA-based Performance Measurement of Seaports in Northeast Asia: Radial and Non-radial Approach *

The center of global container traffic has been shifted from the Europe and the U.S.A. to the region of Northeast Asia, which mainly includes China, Japan and Korea. How to survive in the fiercest competitive environment and to optimize the logistics network in the region of Northeast Asia is becoming a hot topic in both business and academic area. This paper proposes a scheme to estimate the technical efficiency of Northeast Asian seaports as performance measure by radial and non-radial approach of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The outcome reveals that three Chinese seaports (Shanghai, Tianjin and Dalian) as well as three Korean seaports (Busan, Gwangyang, and Incheon) can be considered as efficient ones. Moreover, the paper also attemps to search for benchmark ports, and Shanghai and Busan are the identification of the benchmark seaports in Northeast Asia. The result of technical efficiency estimation shows that there exists a substantial opportunity for improvement in technical efficiency of seaports and also the heterogeneity in the technical efficiency among seaports in Northeast Asia.