Notteboom, Coeck and Van den Broeck (2000). Third, Cullinane et al. (2004) point to the high degree of fluctuation of efficiency over time documented from a sample of 25 container terminals, including some in developing countries. This point is also made by Estache et al. (2004) when discussing the impact of the demand shock due to the East Asia crisis on the Mexican ports located on the Pacific coast of the country. Fourth, based on the Indian experience, De and Ghosh (2002) document the role of the access to capital and its degree of use to the level of efficiency of the sector comparing data from 1981-1982, and 2000-2001 for 12 Indian ports. Fifth, there are many factors driving the efficiency of a port. A few of the papers try to assess systematically the various sources of changes in efficiency. This is the case of Estache et al. (2004) for instance which computes a Malmquist TFP growth index and then relies on a distance function to decompose it into technical, scale and efficiency changes.

From a reform viewpoint, the main lessons are the following. First, the results on the relevance of ownership and the impact of reforms suggest that private ownership tends to improve efficiency in the sector in developing countries. Indeed, Cullinane, et al. (2002) show this in their analysis of 15 Asian container ports during the 1989-1998 period and Notteboom, Coeck and Van den Broeck (2000) reach similar conclusions. Second, increased competition and decentralization of port authorities improves efficiency as shown by Estache et al.. (2002 and 2004) in the case of Mexico. Third, benchmarking is a realistic regulation mode for the sector. Many of the papers are concerned with benchmarking some specific ports or port systems. Tongzon (2001) for instance compares the Australian ports to a set of best practice international ports for 1996 using a DEA. Estache et al. (2002) for instance shows how efficiency measures can be used to promote yardstick competition in the sector in a very pragmatic way. The analysis is done for 14 Mexican port authorities during the 1996-1999 period. The paper includes a discussion of how the use of efficiency measures can be used to shift the burden of proof on the operators in the context of scheduled or unscheduled tariff revisions. Container terminals located in hub ports tend to be more technically efficient than those in feeder ports as documented by Notteboom, Coeck and Van den Broeck (2000) .

# _3.2.2. Railways_

The railways sector also suffers from a low coverage by the academic and regulatory literature offering quantitative assessment of economic efficiency in developing and transition countries as seen in Table 5. Technically, these papers are not very different from those on developed countries in terms of the choices of methodologies. Indeed, a few of them pool data from OECD and non-OECD countries to generate performance rankings in the sector.

Most of these papers deal with the two main characteristics of the railways sector which have long attracted the interest of researchers interested in measuring economic efficiency: multi-output production and natural monopoly. Railway companies have traditionally operated passenger and freight trains simultaneously on their own networks, either at the national or at the regional level. As seen in the Argentina and Brazil papers however, this was changed by the reforms of the 1990s in many countries. Indeed, in these two countries, long distance passenger service has essentially be reduced to a minimum. Intercity infrastructure is for freight and local suburban traffic is mostly 16