Evaluating Vietnam's container terminal efficiency considering carbon neutrality.

This paper aims to assess container terminal (CT) efficiency with the effect of carbon neutrality. Among mechanisms to achieve carbon neutrality in CTs' operations, emission taxes are deemed the most preferred tool to internalize the external costs associated with greenhouse gas emissions by placing a financial burden on polluters. This paper first uses cluster analysis to determine the homogeneous decision-making units (DMUs), i.e., container terminals. A novel approach is proposed to determine the level of emission taxes that DMUs should be levied based on how much CO2 they discharge. Since emission taxes are an undesirable output from the operations of CT operators (CTOs), the Slacks-based Measure Data Envelopment Analysis (SBM-DEA) model is thus employed to incorporate the emission taxes into the research model and to determine the optimal emission taxes for CTOs. Finally, the CTOs in Vietnam (hereafter the VN-CTOs case) are empirically surveyed to verify the proposed model. The proposed research framework can contribute a methodological reference toward the relevant literature in achieving carbon neutrality. Further, the empirical results can provide practical information for the Vietnamese CTOs to improve their CT efficiency. • Selecting DMUs by the cluster analysis gratifies DMUs' homogeneity - one of the basic assumptions of the DEA theory. • Incorporating undesirable output in the evaluation framework of efficiency allows ranking DMUs' performance accurately. • Adopting SBM-DEA to incorporate undesirable output in evaluating efficiency is a methodological contribution to the relevant literature. • Empirical findings posit that some efficient CTOs took aggressive policies to alleviate pollutant emissions at port areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]