Overview
The last years there is an ongoing transformation of the port industry. The increased involvement of private companies, the technological changes, and the globalisation have rapidly transformed the ports. There is a need to rationally distribute the benefits from port services provision and to set the boundaries between the public and private sector in order to have a fair allocation of the benefits and moreover to distribute the costs from the port operation.
The objective of the project is to identify the qualitative and quantitative specifications of the efficient organisational, functional and administrative characteristics, which should be acquired by the port passenger terminals, in order to satisfy the requirements for efficient users service. The research focuses:
- on the rational distribution of port operation costs, based on the direct or indirect benefits acquired by the public and private sectors because of the port operation; and
- on the quantification of the benefits resulting for the various companies (port, shipping, inland transport, logistics, etc) and other stakeholders (port authorities etc) involved in the provision of passenger port services.
The project has four major sections:
- The theoretical review (literature of port development, business organisation, private/public sectors involvement in business etc);
- The survey of research projects in port management and port planning;
- Quantitative and qualitative field research in order to collect data on the benefits of transport companies from port services provisional and
- Verification or rejection of hypotheses in the case of the passenger terminal of Port of Piraeus.
Funding
Results
Policy implications
The implementation of research outcomes will allow a fair distribution of costs for port services production and provision between the public and private sector. This distribution will provide a tool for eliminating the existing market distortions in the port industry. To a major extent, these distortions exist because public and private actors involved in port operations (either as service providers, or port users) do not assume responsibility for a proportion of the costs of port operation at a proportion that equals the benefit this operation results in.
The scientific research on quality management in ports gives a framework that may both reveal opportunities to the practitioners and the decision makers within the port industry in resolving contemporary quality issues and smooth the organisation transformations from the current management era to the next.