The Technical Efficiency of Tunisian Ports: Comparing Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis Scores

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 2007-2017 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 DEA-BCC (0.746) >SFACD (0.536)>DEA-CCR (0.334) from 2007 to 2017. Given these results, the port of Gabes can be considered as the best efficient port in the 3 models (DEA-BCC, DEA-CCR and SFA-CD).