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The purpose of this paper is to estimate and compare the efficiency of several water utilities using three frontier techniques. Moreover, this study estimates the impact of several qualities of service variables on water utilities’ performance.

The paper utilizes three frontier techniques such as data envelopment analysis (DEA), stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and stochastic non-parametric envelopment of data (StoNED) to estimate efficiency scores.

Efficiency scores for each methodological approach were different being on average, 0.745, 0.857 and 0.933 for SFA, DEA and StoNED methods, respectively. Moreover, it was evidenced that water leakage had a statistically significant impact on water utilities’ costs.

The choice of an adequate and robust method for benchmarking the efficiency of water utilities is very relevant for water regulators because it affects decision making process such as water tariffs and design incentives to improve the performance and quality of service of water utilities.

This paper evaluates and compares the performance of a sample of water utilities using three different frontier methods. It has been revealed that the choice of the efficiency assessment method matters. Unlike SFA and DEA, a lower variability was shown in the efficiency scores obtained from the StoNED method.

The present research aims to develop a Terminal Competitiveness Index (TCI) applied to the container terminals located in the Hamburg – Le Havre range, which is an area characterised for its intense container activity. The main components of the TPCI are productivity, foreland connectivity and infrastructure.

To construct the index, the Benefit-of-the-Doubt and the Common Set of Weights methods in Data Envelopment Analysis are used to obtain a common weighting scheme for the evaluation of container terminals.

Results show that connectivity and terminal efficiency are the most important factors for terminal competitiveness. The TCI has identified that APM Terminals Maavslakte II (Rotterdam), ECT Delta (Rotterdam) and MPET (Antwerp) turned out with the highest competitiveness score.

Container terminals play a key role in today’s marketplace since they are the main infrastructure responsible for loading and unloading the containers full of intermediate and final goods. Therefore, the competitiveness of such terminals is crucial for shipping lines and importing and exporting companies, influencing their cost and schedule reliability. However, there is scarce literature studying the competitiveness of container terminals, since the focus to date has been on ports as units of analysis. The terminal-approach used allows the analysis of the competitiveness of terminals belonging to different ports, but also between those located in the same port.