New Initiatives of Port Reform in Taiwan

摘要

The previous researches pointed out that the driving forces of port reform could be one or more several reasons such as the following: (1) globalization of trade;(2) new public management philosophy;(3) technological innovation (such as vessel, cargo tracking, or management information systems);and (4) new government opportunities (processes and strategies), etc. To revitalize or improve the efficiency of port competitiveness, many countries had conducted various port reform programs. Between 1995 and 1999, port of Kaohsiung in Taiwan was ranked as the third largest container throughput port in the world. Due to changes in business environment, Kaohsiung port's position as the world's 3rd container port was overtaken by Busan, Korea in 2000. Since then, Kaohsiung's ranking in the world container port traffic league dropped year by year to 12th place in 2009. Facing new challenges, Taiwan government launched port reform programs to improve the deteriorating situation, including the introduction of the "liberalization and privatization" of port operations in ports of Keelung and Kaohsiung in 1998 and 1999 respectively. Nevertheless, the performance of Taiwan ports has not improved. One decade later, the government decided to launch new initiatives to improve the operations of its ports. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the new programs for changing the governance of port management and operation systems in Taiwan. Following the introduction, section two reviews various reasons and methods to conduct port reform. Section three discusses the processes and new programs to be implemented in Taiwan. Section four discusses an empirical study on stakeholder's opinions on the new programs. Finally, section five presents some concluding remarks.