The marine transportation system plays a significant role in many economies, and ports serve asgateways to economic activities. Ports ability to provide services depends on their facilities, butports typically have to compete for federal, state, local and private funding. To allocate scarceresources efficiently and effectively, decision-makers must be able to assess ports performanceover time and relative to other ports. Conventionally, tonnage or ton-miles statistics are used inbulk port evaluations. These indicators, however, do not reflect the heterogeneity of ports cargoor the economic value of their service, which makes ports performance comparison difficult. Toaddress these issues, we propose three economic port performance measures that add newinformation decision-makers can use in bulk port assessments: total real value of commodities,average real value per ton, and real value index of a port. Container ports already collect similardata in nominal terms, but bulk ports typically do not. Economists, however, track the real valueof commodities when measuring economic performance. Hence, the proposed methodology canbe applied to all, container and bulk, ports. Further, total real value and average real value perton can be used to compare the economic performance of different ports, and real value index ofa port can help assess the economic performance of a given port over time. To illustrate howthese economic port performance measures can be calculated, we use the Port of Duluth-Superioras a case study and produce three series of annual indicators based on publicly available data.
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