Abstract: There is evidence of specialisation around containerised cargo but also a lack of literature regarding its impact on ports' performance. This paper studies the relationship between the level of containerisation and port efficiency and investigates whether the containerisation-efficiency relation varies according to the degree of containerisation. To this end, a two-stage procedure is proposed. In the first stage, the efficiency of 26 Spanish port authorities is estimated by meta-frontier DEA techniques. In the second stage, the effect of containerisation on port efficiency is analysed. The results show evidence of threshold effect of container specialisation on port efficiency. Specialisation in container traffic is beneficial for medium-high-complexity ports when they reach a level of specialisation of 40% in container traffic

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