A solution for this issue is applying synthesis indexes (SI) to evaluate maritime ports sustainability. This research will provide a critical review of the use of SI in sustainability evaluation. This method can be applied to evaluate different aspects of maritime port sustainable development and also analyzing the relationship between them.
CELEBRATE VIET NAM TEACHERS’ DAY 20/11/2018 APPLICATION OF SYNTHESIS INDEXES (SI) TO THE PORT SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT MEASUREMENT: A CRITICAL REVIEW VU THANH TRUNG Faculty of Maritime Business, Vietnam Maritime University Abstract Measuring sustainable development of port has been the major concern of many academics in a last few decades Sustainable development is multidimensional issues so that it needs to be assessed in three dimensions, namely, economic, social and environmental dimensions Therefore, properly measuring sustainability in all aspects seems to be difficult The reason is that there is not a single benchmark for assessing all these facets of sustainability as variables employed in evaluating the three facets are distinct A solution for this issue is applying synthesis indexes (SI) to evaluate maritime ports sustainability This research will provide a critical review of the use of SI in sustainability evaluation This method can be applied to evaluate different aspects of maritime port sustainable development and also analyzing the relationship between them Keywords: Sustainable development, port, synthesis indexes Tóm tắt Đo lường phát triển bền vững cảng vấn đề thu hút nhiều quan tâm nhà nghiên cứu vòng vài thập kỷ gần Phát triển bền vững vấn đề đa chiều cần phải đánh gái ba khía cạnh, kinh tế, xã hội mơi trường Từ thấy đo lường ba khía cạnh bền vững cơng việc khó khăn khơng có thang đo cụ thể sử dụng để đo lường tất khía cạnh bền vững Ngun nhân tiêu chí sử dụng để đo lường khía cạnh bền vững khác Giải pháp cho vấn đề áp dụng phương pháp số tổng hợp để đánh giá phát triển bền vững cảng biển Bài báo cung cấp nghiên cứu tổng hợp cách sử dụng số tổng hợp (SI) để đánh giá phát triển bền vững Phương pháp áp dụng để đánh giá khía cạnh khác phát triển bền vững cảng biển đồng thời phân tích mối quan hệ khía cạnh Keywords: Phát triển bền vững, cảng, số tổng hợp Introduction Sustainable development has attracted the great deal of attention of not only firm managers but also many researchers in a last few decades The concept of sustainable development implies the relationship between economic development, social equality and environmental quality This idea was introduced in 1972 and has evolved over years Sustainable development can be defined as “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs” [1] Another definition of sustainability commonly used among scholars and managers is that sustainability is comprised of economic growth, social improvement (equality, poverty alleviation and job creation) and environment protection In short, sustainable development is comprised of three aspects: economic, environmental and social improvement It is very important to give equal attention to each component to achieve sustainable outcome In the port manager perspective, the port sustainable development can be understood as the development that brings about economic growth, creates a number of job for the locals and improve their standard of living, makes an increasingly higher contributions to the state budget, supports other local firms, increases national security and protects local as well as national ecosystem [2] It is widely recognized that individuals, societies and government have to find tools and models to assess the sustainability of their activities The reason is that sustainability evaluation is important as it is the useful guidance for ports to achieve sustainable development Furthermore, Kates et al (2001) [3] state that the aim of sustainability assessment is assisting policy makers to take appropriate actions to make society sustainable by providing an evaluation of integrated nature- society system in short run as well as in long run Therefore, this paper provides the review of the applications of one of the newly introduced method is known as Port Sustainability Synthetic Indices (SI) in different contexts In fact, this method can be used to qualitatively measure the port sustainability by employing different variables That means, number of variables employed in measuring the sustainability are not fixed and they depend on the availability of the variables, researcher purposes and economic context Therefore, the article will review the use of SI in different situations In addition, SI not only allows 58 Journal of Marine Science and Technology No 56 – November 2018 CELEBRATE VIET NAM TEACHERS’ DAY 20/11/2018 managers and researchers to assess components of sustainable development separately but also compare them Consequently, to provide empirical evidence for port’s sustainable development strategic planning Literature review of sustainability measurement There have been numerous researches on the field of port sustainable development since the beginning of 21th century However, there are very few methodological contributions to attempt to quantitatively measure maritime port sustainability The sustainability of ports can be assessed by using SWOT matrix This approach provides many qualitative empirical evidence of what have been happening in particular port and port system of given region [4] Besides that, multi-criteria decision making – MCDM and Analytical Hierarchy Process – AHP are commonly used to evaluate the port sustainable development [5], [6] Another model commonly used to examine the sustainable development of ports in term of geographical location is Bird’s any port model and its modified models [6], [7], [8] There are many modified models of ports development in Western countries as well as Eastern countries based on Bird’s any port model for sustainability assessment In addition, creating sustainability indicators based on efficiency standpoints is also a method used to assess sustainability of sea ports [12], [13] These studies use data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique to derive indicators from input - output data Furthermore, there are some other assessment methods used in evaluating the port sustainable development such as Confirmatory Factor Analysis - CFA measuring sustainable development by using 31 sub-indicators grouped into four categories, namely, environmental material, economic issue, environmental practices and social concern [14], [15] Although, the scholars have used many different methodologies to measure sustainability, these methods seem not to provide rigorous sustainability measurements Most of the studies mentioned above are not prior to evaluate all three dimensions of sustainable development simultaneously but separately A facet of sustainable development that attracts the most attentions of the scholars is environment A number of studies focus on impacts of environmental policies on environment surrounding ports They aim to evaluate the effects of environmental policies application on quality of ports environment in ASEAN [16] and in some countries in EU [17], [18], [19] Nonetheless, other researches measure the damage on environment by comparing the empirical data such as the amount of greenhouse gases resulted from ports operation with the appropriate benchmarks [20], [21] Besides, geographical location is also assessed in order to achieve the sustainable development [11], [22] Environmental and economic aspects can be evaluated at the same time and its resultant tradeoff between environmental and economic benefits [5], [23] Some articles can make assessments of the maritime port sustainable development based on evaluating three aspects of sustainability [14], [15] but the indicators are not comparable The approach that has been recently used is Port Sustainability Synthetic Index The method provides a measurement of multidimensional concepts - sustainable development Furthermore, the SI has some advantages such as providing holistic view of the linkage between three dimensions of sustainable development and able to analyze many types of information by using adaptive and frequently updated indicators Therefore, it solves the problem that variables sometime are incomparable because of different unit of measurement by providing the synthetic index converting all different unit of measurement into one This, in turn, also allows a comparison among different aspects of sustainability [23], [24] Synthetic Indexes (SI) approach Synthetic Indexes are commonly used in economics to calculate aggregate information from a set of grouped variables The variables are classified into different group of different levels of hierarchy It is acceptable for measuring a complex and multidimensional issues Comparing different economic, social and environmental realities seems to offers irrelevant findings because they measure different facets of sustainability However, sustainability is complex and multidimensional issue and required to be assessed in all dimensions Therefore, synthetic indexes (SI) that are composite indexes of individual, grouped and weighted variables are appropriate for multidimensional concepts This allows policy makers to conduct a full analysis of realities Resultantly, it can help policy makers to make decision concerning individual aspect as well as integral aspects [23] In general, there are several steps to obtain an SI including: Step 1: Generating an initial database This step includes a selecting a set of variables to form definitive database These variables have to be present in form of quantitative and relative Journal of Marine Science and Technology No 56 – November 2018 59 CELEBRATE VIET NAM TEACHERS’ DAY 20/11/2018 values so that it allows a comparison between variables The categorical or qualitative values are not acceptable Step 2: Identifying and selecting the important variables The final database is made from subset of definitive database after removing all irrelevant variables o Dimension where the variables belong o Indicator that the variables fit o Definition and description of the variables o Source of the information o Calculation method Step 3: The values of the dimensions are generated following the procedure below o Correcting the outliers of the variables if it is necessary o Typifying the corrected values o Grouping them according to indicators and converting them into standard normal percentiles with values ranging from to 100 o SI values will be calculated by weighting the average of the percentiles that are obtained for each dimension or component of index In order to measure the sustainable developments of ports by using SI, the set of variables have to be identified based on the research objects - sustainability measurement Afterwards, the selected variables have to be grouped in three main categories that are three dimensions of sustainable development, namely, economic, social and environmental dimensions Laxe et al (2016, 2017) states that three dimensions can be measured by employed the set of variables including economic structure and business and services for economic dimension, social capital, human capital, fairness and health for social dimension, environmental management, eco-efficiency and environmental quality for environmental dimension [23], [25] The variables used to assess the environment aspect of sustainability by Laxe et al are similar to those are employed for evaluating environmental aspect of ports in Taiwan [26] and Vietnam and Cambodia [16] (Table 1) In general, the similarity between these studies is that the sustainability is seen through point of view of the port manager Therefore, the variables employed will measure how well the ports economically, socially and environmentally perform Table Indicators and sub-indicators for the sustainability measurement Indicator Economic aspect Social aspect Environmental aspect Economic structure Business and services Social capital Human capital Fairness Health Environmental management Eco-efficiency Environmental quality Sub-indicator Value generated and productivity, economic and financial situation Business, services Employment Training Gender equality Labor structure, occupational accidents, health Economic behavior in environmental issues Environmental training, efficiency in resources use Water consumption and water quality According to Asgari et al (2015) there are some other variables might be involved in the definitive database as below (Table 2) [5] Asgari et al stand in the policymaker perspective, they measure sustainability of the ports by employing variables related to policy implementations Table Indicators for the economical - environmental measurement Economic dimension Indicator Cost efficiency Hight quality services 60 Environmental Dimension Indicator Establish environmental policies Identifying environmental impacts Identifying environmental objectives and priorities Develop environmental concepts Training and awareness Emergency preparedness and response Journal of Marine Science and Technology No 56 – November 2018 CELEBRATE VIET NAM TEACHERS’ DAY 20/11/2018 In the local government perspective, port development is considered to be sustainable when it contributes to the growth of local economy, improvement of local community and preservation of local environment [27], [28] They also propose some variables that should be employed to evaluate three dimensions of sustainability These are shown in Table Table Indicators and sub-indicators for the economic and environmental measurement Indicator Economic aspect Social aspect Environmental aspect GDP and tax generation, productivity, profitability and income Spatial impact on community, quality of living & working environment Employment impact, heritage and cultural impact Water quality, air quality, coastal and maritime environment Waste management Researchers can form a definitive database with all these variables mentioned above After forming the definitive database, it will be further narrowed down depending on real economic circumstances to make final database When the final database is formed and all indicators are classified into three dimensions of sustainable development, the process of analysis will be carried out following steps: First step: Collecting the observed values of all variables; Second step: calculating Z-scores, this step will typify variable and make them comparable; Third step: values of percentiles 97.5 and 2.5 will be removed to avoid distorting the results under effect of extreme values; Final step: the final step has some sub-steps involved: o Values reaching 97.5 and 2.5 percentile will be corrected; o Calculating the simple average of the Z-scores of the variables to obtain adjusted value of typified variable of each variable; o Calculating the final values of each dimensions of sustainability based on weighted average of typified variable of the indicators Conclusion There are numerous research papers shading light on the maritime ports sustainability in the last few decades The question related to this field that has been raised is how the scholars can properly measure the sustainability of port An application of SI is considered to be an answer for the question because it provides a holistic approach to port sustainability assessment by employing indicators that can be adapted for different research scopes In other words, port sustainability can be properly measured in all three dimensions and more by using synthetic indexes However, each dimension cannot be measured by employing the same variables because researchers with different point of views concern particular development issues Therefore, they select the different set of variables This paper will assist the researchers and managers to find an appropriate set of variables with the critical review of the applications of SI in different context The number of variables employed will depends on the purpose of the researchers and the availability of these variables There is the review of some proposed variables that can be used to measure the 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2018 ... Calculating the simple average of the Z-scores of the variables to obtain adjusted value of typified variable of each variable; o Calculating the final values of each dimensions of sustainability... circumstances to make final database When the final database is formed and all indicators are classified into three dimensions of sustainable development, the process of analysis will be carried... MCDM and Analytical Hierarchy Process – AHP are commonly used to evaluate the port sustainable development [5], [6] Another model commonly used to examine the sustainable development of ports