A few commentators have gotten the hump about Bell Bay being quite highly ranked (well, highly ranked relative to other Australian container ports anyway) in the World Bank’s Container Port Performance Index.
Bell Bay gets a CPPI 2024 ranking of 196, which leaves behind several more well-known Australian ports.
It’s worth pondering on this.
Every year that the CPPI is published, somebody, somewhere, points to a lower-traffic port that has risen, or fallen, or has scored higher than a much bigger port. For example, in the first year of publication, we recall people sneering that Dutch Harbor in Alaska scored highly. It was described by one commentator as a “crabbing port,” and, hey, fair comment, it is primarily a commercial fishing port. Therefore, the implication goes, the whole index is invalid.
In the latest report, fingers are being pointed at Bell Bay. This is a deep-water port on the north coast of Tasmania. No offence to anyone who loves Bell Bay, but we think it is fair to say that it is not regarded as a leading container port. The port handled about 27,000 TEU in the 2024 Financial Year, according to the TasPorts Annual Report 2023–2024. Which is fine, that’s not a criticism. There are big volume ports and small volume ports and everything in between. It’s OK to be a big volume port, or a small volume port, or a port that has a volume somewhere in-between.
Relevance?
And none of that’s really relevant to the CPPI anyway.
As we explain in some detail in another of our articles, the CPPI is an objective measure of container port performance based on vessel time in port. The objectivity comes from a large amount of real-life data (AIS information generated as ships enter and leave port). This data is gathered from thousands of providers over a near ten-year period.
This has implications.
Bell Bay is a smaller port with much lighter volumes of vessel and container traffic. It stands to reason that a small, well-managed, port is going to score reasonably well on any system that tracks ship time in port.
It’s possible that Bell Bay’s score might swing around a bit from year-to-year because it receives fewer port calls. That’s not a criticism of Bell Bay or the CPPI. That’s just how statistics work.
The World Bank does address this exact point. At Figure 3.4, the Report points out that “some of the smallest ports [as] measured by the number of ports calls also achieve short times at berth. In these cases, the causality is different: not the number of cranes per ship, but the efficient handling of ships with low volumes allows for short stopovers”.
Elsewhere, in Section 5.3, it points out that ports with fewer than 24 container calls per year are excluded from the calculations. Of the 529 ports in the dataset, 106 were cut, leaving 403 in this year’s report. It stands to reason that some lower volume ports will occasionally receive more calls than usual and could find themselves in the Index.
Unreal standards of perfection
On that point, we feel that no-one ought to expect unreal standards of perfection. In any measuring system you care to think of, there will be interesting outliers and anomalies.
The average male height, for example, is between 159 cm to 185 cm. The tallest man (Leys et al, 2019) at the time of Leys’ research was Mr Sultan Kösen at 251cm.
While he’s certainly not of average height, it doesn’t mean that Mr Kösen is invalid as an example of a human male. It just means that he’s really tall compared to other human males.
Nor does Mr Kösen’s height prove that systems of measuring and calculating human height are invalid.
It just shows there’s a data point that might cause some people to say, “oh, how interesting”.
And those people might then think no more of it. Or they might remember it and quote it in an article about container logistics. That’s all.
As it is with Mr Kösen, so too it is with the Port of Bell Bay.
Arguments to the contrary?
Unsupported.
Invalid.
Disregard.
References
Leys, C., Delacre, M., Mora, Y. L., & Lakens, D. (2019). How to classify, detect, and manage univariate and multivariate outliers, with emphasis on pre-registration. International Review of Social Psychology, 32(1), Article 5. https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.289
