Public-private partnerships and scale efficiency in Brazilian ports: Evidence from two-stage DEA analysis

•This paper assesses the impacts of PPPs on major Brazilian public ports.•Results indicate a strong positive impact of PPPs on port scale efficiency.•Methodology relied on factor extraction followed by bootstrapped truncated regression.

This paper assesses the impacts of public-private partnerships on major Brazilian public ports. It is proposed that these kinds of arrangements with private terminal operators could help achieving higher levels of scale efficiency by enhancing coordination processes, providing more adequate information technologies, and higher connectivity with other transportation modes. Methodology relies on factor extraction of inputs/outputs as a first step to compute DEA efficiency estimates, followed by truncated bootstrapped regression analysis to test different contextual variables. Results indicate a strong positive impact of public-private partnerships on port scale efficiency, corroborating their impacts in relation to the most productive scale size.