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This study examines port and container terminal characteristics, and assesses how they affect performance. Little research has addressed the relationship between location, physical infrastructure (hard) and service (soft) characteristics, and container terminal performance. The present study fills this research gap. Performance is explained using a holistic perspective involving multivariate factors. A questionnaire sent to 12 container terminals in Portugal and Spain yielded 122 responses. Structural equation modelling confirmed the influence of port and terminal characteristics on container terminal performance. Performance was measured in terms of efficiency, activity and customer satisfaction. Five main characteristics were found to influence container terminal performance: regional and continental location, sea and land access, maritime shipping services, dynamism of port authorities, and terminal organization and logistics integration.

This paper analyzes the process of long-run co-movements and stock market globalization on the basis of cointegration tests and vector error correction (VEC) models. The cointegration tests used here allow for structural breaks to be explicitly modeled and breakpoints to be computed on a relative-time basis. The data used in our empirical analysis were drawn from Datastream and comprise the natural logarithms of relative stock market indexes since 1973 for the G7 countries. The main results point to the conclusion that significant causal cointegration effects occur in this context and that there is a long-run equilibrium relationship that governs the worldwide process of market integration. Globalization, however, is a complex adjustment process and in many cases there is only evidence of weak market integration which means that non-proportional price transmission occurs in the market along with proportional changes. The worldwide markets, as expected, appear to be driven in general by the US stock market., Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, 5 tables, submitted to Chinese Science Bulletin