Productivity in cargo handling in Spanish ports during a period of regulatory reforms

The objective of this research is to measure productivity changes in cargo handling operations in Spanish ports. By means of Data Envelopment Analysis and the calculation of the Malmquist indices we have decomposed those changes into efficiency and technical change effects. The study covers a period from 1994 to 1998, when the significant regulatory and technical changes introduced during the eighties had matured. The results show an improvement in productivity imputable totally to technical change, since the technical efficiency has not been corrected in that period