Port Competitiveness

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Ports and cities are historically strongly linked, but the link between port and city growth has become weaker. This book examines how ports can regain their role as drivers of urban economic growth and how negative port impacts can be mitigated.

Introducing a new methodology for measuring competitiveness in shipping ports, this analysis provides policy makers, industry practitioners, and academics with a pragmatic approach to the peculiarities of large ports around the world. Using quantitative measures as well as holistic and cultural considerations, the manual describes the general workings of the container port and shipping industry and provides in-depth case studies of ports in Southeast Asia, the Pearl River Delta, the Yangtze River Delta, and Northwest Europe.

Ports in Proximity provides an overview of key contemporary research in the field through a broad range of international case studies. The concepts of strategic management, supply chain management, port and transport economics and economic and transport geography are applied throughout the book to offer an in-depth understanding of the processes underlying spatial and functional dynamics in port systems. The opportunities for cooperation between competing adjacent ports is examined while the avenues for further joint research are identified, setting an agenda for further study.

Port Economics, Management and Policy provides a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary port industry, showing how ports are organized to serve the global economy and support regional and local development. Structured in eight sections plus an introduction and epilog, this textbook examines a wide range of seaport topics, covering maritime shipping and international trade, port terminals, port governance, port competition, port policy and much more. Key features of the book include: Multidisciplinary perspective, drawing on economics, geography, management science and engineering Multisector analysis including containers, bulk, break-bulk and the cruise industry Focus on the latest industry trends, such as supply chain management, automation, digitalization and sustainability Benefitting from the authors’ extensive involvement in shaping the port sector across five continents, this text provides students and scholars with a valuable resource on ports and maritime transport systems. Practitioners and policymakers can also use this as an essential guide towards better port management and governance.

This book belongs to the Port Economics and Global Supply Chain Management strand of the Palgrave Studies in Maritime Economics book series, commissioned by Hercules Haralambides. This book addresses the strategic alignment between port authorities and their supply chain partners, with a focus on governance challenges. Many port (authority) managers are engaged in efforts to improve their strategic alignment with business partners in their proximate geographic region, yet the economic objectives pursued can vary widely. These objectives can include improvements in port competitiveness and stability of traffic flows, as well as better access to scarce resources such as land and capital, or simply more control over the logistics chain. Using various Benelux seaports as case studies, the authors of this volume show that improving strategic alignment can involve a wide variety of different governance choices, ranging from top-down to bottom-up alliance formation, from project-driven to multi-activity collaboration, and from long-term contracting to full-fledged mergers. This book with state-of-the-art insight on modern port governance will be of interest to port managers around the globe, as well as to lecturers and students in maritime educational programs. Chapter 4 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This Round Table publication discusses the policy and regulatory challenges posed by the rapidly changing port environment.

Port Development and Competition in East and Southern Africa analyzes the 15 main ports in East and Southern Africa (ESA) to assess whether their proposed capacity enhancements are justified by current and projected demand; whether the current port management approaches sufficiently address not only the maritime capacity needs but also other impediments to port efficiency; and what the expected hierarchy of ports in the region will be in the future. The analysis confirms the need to increase maritime capacity, as the overall container demand in the ports in scope is predicted to begin exceeding total current capacity by between 2025 and 2030, while gaps in terms of dry and liquid bulk handling are expected even sooner. However, in the case of many of the ports, the issue of landside access—the ports’ intermodal connectivity, the ease of international border crossing, and the port-city interface—is more important than the need to improve maritime access and capacity. The analysis finds that there is a need to improve the operating efficiency in all of the ESA ports, as they are currently less than half as productive as the most efficient ports in the matched data set of similar ports across the world, in terms of efficiency in container-handling operations. Similarly, there is a need to improve and formalize stakeholder engagement in many of the ports, to introduce modern management systems, and to strengthen the institutional framework to ensure the most efficient use of the infrastructure and to be able to attract private capital and specialist terminal operators. Finally, given the ports’ geographic location and proximity to main shipping routes, available draft, and the ongoing port-and-hinterland development, the book concludes that Durban and Djibouti are the most likely to emerge as the regional hubs in ESA’s future hub-and-spoke system.