Arrival time
Time at anchor or in waiting areas plus the transit to the berth. It is included in the index.
Basis
What exactly it measures
Time at berth
From “all fast” to “all lines released”, including loading and unloading. It is included in the calculation.
Departure time
The departure manoeuvre is recorded separately and is not part of the index.
Time in port captures operational, organisational, nautical and institutional factors at once: quay productivity, terminal coordination, arrival sequencing, waiting at anchor and hinterland connections. Its advantage is threefold: it is observed behaviour (not self-reported), it reflects shipping lines’ real experience and it allows ports of different sizes and regions to be compared.
Stratification
5 ship sizes × 10 call sizes
Each call is assigned to one of five ship-size groups and one of ten bands of container moves (from fewer than 250 to more than 6,000), chosen so that crane intensity is comparable within each band. Indicators are built separately for each group — a feeder’s operation looks nothing like a ULCV’s — and then aggregated consistently.
Feeder
< 1,500 TEU
Intra-regional
1,501 – 5,000 TEU
Intermediate
5,001 – 8,500 TEU
Neopanamax
8,501 – 13,500 TEU
Ultra large (ULCV)
> 13,500 TEU
Approach 1
Administrative
A structured, transparent aggregation of times normalised by ship-size and call-size group. Each port gains or loses points depending on whether it performs better or worse than the global average for its category. It reflects expert knowledge of port operations and is easy to interpret.
Approach 2
Statistical
It analyses all of each port’s time data together (factor analysis): it gives more weight to signals that consistently point in the same direction and less to isolated observations, so that no single indicator dominates the result. EED’s port profiles show both components whenever the annex publishes them.
Data origin
Source and coverage
The index is built on call-by-call data from the S&P Global Market Intelligence Port Performance Program, drawn mainly from AIS records and from ports’ and terminals’ own information. Only observed calls with at least one container move count, and every port must pass the same minimum observation thresholds: those that fall short are left out of the index, even though they remain visible in the underlying data.
How EED interprets it
What the index does not say
The CPPI is an operational benchmark. These are the caveats with which this section presents every figure.
Official methodology noteIt is not an overall rating
It measures container ships’ time in port. It does not assess tariffs, sustainability, connectivity or the port’s other traffic.
The call profile matters
Weather, draught, tides, fleet mix, route diversions and global congestion all play a part. A transhipment hub and a gateway port do not handle the same kind of call.
A revisable, auditable series
Each edition may re-estimate earlier years. EED keeps every edition and the original annex, and flags as “derived” any historical rank the annex does not publish.
Traceability at EED
El Estrecho Digital’s data warehouse stores every edition of the official annex (original XLSX included, with its SHA-256 fingerprint) and only links ports by exact UN/LOCODE, with no fuzzy matching. If a figure published here differs from a future World Bank edition, both versions remain reproducible.
Indicators · EED Data
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