Large-scale port development projects have recently required a huge amount of diversified financial sources, due to enlarging size of container vessels, so that separate responsible authorities of investment and maintenance are found in many cases. An optimum Life-Cycle Management (LCM) can be achieved by minimizing a sum of investment and maintenance costs accumulated over the service period of 40-50 years. However, the optimum LCM can not be achieved if responsible authorities are separate as mentioned above, because each authority naturally seeks for minimizing its own cost.
　Therefore, the purpose of this study is to collect and analyze examples of diversified financial sources of large-scale port development projects, and make an international comparison, so as to provide relevant information in case of designing a better financial scheme for the optimum LCM management. The following studies are found as the previous related researches.
ⅰ) ESPO (European Sea Port Organisation) completed a fact finding study on financial sources for port development in its member countries in 2004, which provides relevant information in this field.
ⅱ) U.S. MARAD completed the “U.S. Public Port Expenditure Report FYs 2005 & 2006-2010”, so as to keep financial transparency of the port authorities. However, port-related infrastructure of channel, basin, hinterland access road/rail is not included in this report, because their responsible authorities are not port authorities.
　Questionnaire survey on “Port Development Project Financing” was carried out among the IAPH (International Association of Ports and Harbors) member ports in February 2009. Among 202 regular member ports to which Questionnaires were delivered, 26 port development projects were collected from 16 countries. The international comparison was achieved for financial sources of the collected port development projects, so that relevant issues were clarified for an integrated financial scheme of the optimum LCM.