Synopses & Reviews
This book argues that long dwell time in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) ports is not exclusively the responsibility of customs as usually believed. The private sector (terminal operator, customs broker, owner of container depots, and even importers) has not necessarily an interest in reducing time spent in ports. The solution to decrease dwell time in these ports relies mainly on the challenging task of breaking the private sector 's collusion and equilibrium between public authorities, logistics operators, and some importers.This book was written in the context of increasing investment by the international community in projects that promote trade facilitation and improvement in logistics in the developing world, including in ports, mainly based on the assumption that in ports, customs (and other controlling agencies) have to be mainly blamed for abnormal delays. However, customs responsibility (especially for months-long delays) may not be as important as usually believed and therefore requires in-depth data collection and analysis which has been lacking so far. The authors disentangle cargo delays in ports with comprehensive data collection in six ports in SSA and firms surveys in five countries. Based on this data collection, they find that cargo dwell time in ports in SSA (except Durban) are very long compared to large ports in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. In these ports, there is collusion between controlling agencies, port authorities, private terminal operators, logistics operators (freight forwarders) and large shippers at the expense of consumers. The market structure of the private sector explains the hysteresis of cargo dwell time. Finally, the structure of the SSA economies with few export-oriented producers (and the dominance of traditional import/export traders) reinforces the status quo since they are usually not organized to be competitive worldwide.
Synopsis
Sub-Saharan Africa has a serious infrastructure deficit-estimated at about $48 billion a year-which is impeding the continent's competitiveness and hence its economic growth. How to solve this problem? Some advocate building more infrastructure while others suggest privatizing, or contracting out to the private sector, the management of infrastructure so that the discipline of the market will lead to more and better quality services.This book graphically illustrates the problem in the case of Africa's ports. With the exception of Durban, cargo dwell times-the amount of time cargo spends in the port-average about 20 days in African ports, compared with 3-4 days in most other international ports.