Juan Castanedo

A Cost–Benefit Analysis of a New Container Terminal

This paper present a cost–benefit analysis approach applied to measure benefits involving the expansion of container capacity in a seaport context. The paper starts by setting out the theoretical background for identifying and measuring the project benefits. There have been identified and calculated three different benefits: benefits from existing traffic, benefits from avoided diversion costs and benefits from generated traffic. A practical application of this methodology has been included. The results for this application show that this project is viable, either if this infrastructure has congestion problems in the present or may have them in the short term.

Impact of New Technology on Port Administration

This article presents an approach to the impact of new technology on the management of port services. After an introduction on motivation, there are three sections of a descriptive nature in which the methods used to incorporate new technology in the management of the port sector are presented. In the fourth section an empirical approximation is carried out, focusing on efficiency frontiers, on the impact of investment in new technology in Spanish ports for the period 1985–1995. The research is conclusive on the existence of technological progress in the Spanish port sector from the 1990s onwards, with more technical efficiency in ports that have been pioneers in applying new information technology such as Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao, Las Palmas and Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

Analysis of the Returns to Scale, Elasticities of Substitution and Behavior of Shipping (General Cargo) Production

The empirical analysis of production functions can be directed at least in two different ways which may have the same results. Firstly, we may directly assume a particular and flexible production function, and then test the different restrictions stage by stage, in order to find the most suitable functional form. An alternative way would be to assume cost, profit or input conditioned demand functions, which, after satisfying the corresponding duality theorems must provide the same information as the production function. Therefore, if the production integrability problem allows us to change from a cost function – for instance – to a production function, the technology can be perfectly detected from such a cost function. In this study, I will use the former method in which a flexible functional form such as the logarithmic transcendental or translog is directly assumed, which allows us to execute different parametrical tests of the various properties of the production technology. This choice requires information about the amount of output and of productive input. Some interesting results can be obtained from this function, such as the input elasticities of substitution, the returns to scale of the production function, the marginal products of inputs, the output elasticities and different economic hypotheses.

Introduction to Essays on Port Economics

The aim of Essays on Port Economics is to offer further reading for specialist and postgraduate courses, Master’s degrees and doctorates in Economics, Business Administration, Engineering, the merchant navy and other port professionals. The editors all teach at the University of Cantabria: Pablo Coto-Millan has a Ph.D. in Economics and is a Professor of Transport Economics and Microeconomics; Miguel Angel Pesquera has a Ph.D. in Engineering and is a Professor of Port Management and Operations, and Juan Castanedo has a Ph.D. in Marine Sciences and Merchant Shipping and is an Associate Professor of Port Management and Operations.

Returns to Scale, Elasticities of Substitution and Behavior of Shipping (Dry Bulk) Transport Costs, Some Empirical Evidence

In the present section, we estimate cost functions for Solid Bulk shipping transport by 34 private firms for 1991. The functional form used is the Translog drawn by Christensen et al. (1973). We also estimate the Allen and Morishima elasticities of substitution, and compare and interpret the results as well.

Scale Economies, Elasticities of Substitution and Behaviour of the Railway Transport Costs in Spain

In this paper, we have studied the behaviour of state company RENFE costs from 1964 to 1992. Translog function with the restriction of grade-one homogeneity in the factor prices, has been analized and acceptable results have been obtained for the vehicles-km output. The cost function estimated has an good behaviour since it meets the conditions of monotonicity, quasi concavity and grade-one homogeneity in the factor prices.