Assessment of Ports Competiveness in West and Central African Sub-Regions Using Priest Analytic Hierarchy Process: The Defies &Incompetence of the Port of Douala (Cameroon)

Ports play a fundamental role in a sustainable integration of Africa in International trade. Both importers and exporters, shipping companies and government, however face high cost for sea transport and substantial inefficiency in port operations. This has resulted in congestion, higher dwell time, higher costs which affect the competitive ability in sub regional and global economy. This study investigates the main factors explaining poor container handling operations and limited competitive ability in Cameroonian Ports and aggregating this to the competitive position of Cameroonian ports in the West and Central African sub-regions (WCA). Using Analytic Hierarchy Process (A.H.P), the paper seeks to provide a basic understanding of container transportation and port’s terminal operations problems (constraints & ineffectiveness) in Cameroon.

An Evaluation of Abidjan Container Terminal Competitive Position in West Africa Using a Fuzzy Quantified SWOT Framework

This article proposes a quantified SWOT framework which integrates fuzzy linguistic preference relation to evaluate the competitive position of Abidjan container terminal in West Africa. The integration of fuzzy linguistic preference relation in the quantified SWOT framework circumvents the difficulties in terms of data collection and consistency of judgment matrices prevailing in the conventional AHP and Fuzzy AHP. Moreover, the study provides relevant evidences about the key internal and external attributes shipping lines considered as important and hence the attributes that ports/ terminals most need to enhance in order to improve their attractiveness and be well positioned in the market. On the other hand, the change in terminals competitive position between 2010 and 2013 highlights that the difficulties of West African ports in attracting customers in the sub-region are not only related to internal problems such as inadequate infrastructures, facilities or inefficiency, but significant political and economic constraint outside the ports constraints their competitiveness.

REGIONAL CONTAINER PORT COMPETITION IN A DUAL GATEWAY-PORT SYSTEM

Many ocean transportation hub systems consist of two container ports that share the container handling business in the area. The container flow passing through a port is the main measurement of the port＇s competitiveness. In this paper we adopt a Hotelling model to study the container port competition in a so-called ＂dual gateway-port system＂. The system contains two ports and two terminals, one belonging to each port. The two governments in which the two ports are located compete on cargo fees and the two terminals determine service price and service quality. We study two models with different levels of competition between the terminals. In the ftrst model, the two terminals are owned by two different operators and in the second model, the two terminals are centralized under one operator. The second model exists in practice but is not well studied in the literature. We derive the cargo fee, terminal service price, and service quality equilibria for these two models. We investigate the competition outcome sensitivity with a numerical study. The numerical results reveal that governments prefer terminals to compete with each other. If the terminals do not have competitive advantages in their service quality, then terminal centralization brings more profits to the terminal operator than the competition case.