Luo, J.; Meng, B.; Wang, S., and Kuang, H., 2020. Research on the development of China's marine economy from the perspective of the operational efficiency of shipping enterprises. In: Yang, D.F. and Wang, H. (eds.), Recent Advances in Marine Geology and Environmental Oceanography. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 108, pp. 12–15. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.

Developing the marine economy is a recent trend in China's development strategy. A more in-depth exploration into the marine economy is of great theoretical and practical importance. Still, there have not been adequate studies that focus on the efficiency of shipping enterprises. The global financial crisis of 2009 had tremendous impacts on the shipping industry. At one point, the Baltic Dry Index (BDI) dropped sharply to 445, leading most Chinese companies to undertake business volume reduction and financial loss. As a result, problems such as asset reorganization, job cuts, and asset selling occurred. This imposed huge pressure on the systems related to the marine economy. In this paper, the dynamic stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) method was used to select listed shipping companies as the case studies and collect their financial data over the past 6 years. The results show that the efficiency level of the listed companies in the shipping industry is quite different, which means that there are vast differences in the management and resource allocation capabilities of these sample companies. As globalization advances forward, increasing international competition in the shipping industry has caused enormous challenges to shipping companies. The empirical results show that the operational efficiency of China's shipping industry is of considerable significance to enhance the ability of risk identification, increase scientific and technological support, and address other challenges to improve China's overall marine economic strength and optimize the industrial structure of the marine economy.