More than 80% of the Brazilian international trade is by sea, the port assumes an unquestionable importance in the process of national economic growth. Also considered as a factor for socioeconomic development to region nearby. In this context, the necessity to evaluate the port efficiency is essential to assure the competitiveness of the national products on external markets. This paper will analyze the two main approaches of evaluation of port efficiency, in special the Stochastic Frontiers and the Data Envelopment Analysis. It will show the main evidences of the performance of the existing techniques and which is the better for the case of the port efficiency. The Stochastic Frontiers presented as main advantage the fact to compare the results with technical parameters or normalized, however it only analyze one product for time. The Data Envelopment Analysis has as advantage, the possibility to analyze multiples products, however with a reduced number of samples.
ports; port efficiency; data envelopment analysis; stochastic frontier