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The UK Freeports initiative
The UK, after claiming that the EU had been holding back the development of UK’s ports, launched a UK Freeports initiative as a major instrument to shape the UK’s economic development post-Brexit by Peter de Langen Up to 10 Freeports are foreseen. These Freeports are to be privately developed in rail, air and seaports -probably mainly the seaports- and to be selected through a competitive bidding process. The UK has launched a public consultation to develop its freeport policy. The Freeport (or freezone) model works well in a variety...
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A crisis like no other: the adaptive capacities of ports & shipping
The main implications of the pandemic on global logistics with a specific focus on container ports and shipping lines is the theme of a joint contribution by Theo Notteboom, Thanos Pallis and Jean-Paul Rodrigue in the 100th issue of Port Technology International. The COVID-19 pandemic led to the second global crisis since the 2009 financial crisis, which resulted in a recession in all OECD countries and most emerging economies. It fundamentally challenged the direction of future trade flows and trade arrangements. The stability...
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IAPH-WPSP COVID19 port economic impact barometer: half year report
IAPH published the half-year report of its COVID-19 Port Economic Impact Barometer authored by PortEconomics members Theo Notteboom and Thanos Pallis. On the week following the six month anniversary of the World Health Organization (WHO) announcement of COVID-19 as a global pandemic, the International Association of Ports and Harbors (IAPH) has published a comprehensive report summarising all findings from its twelve surveys of global ports since early April, including its most recent survey to ports in week 36. The COVID-19...
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Shipping technologies: from wind to coal … and breakbulk to containers
by Cesar Ducreat Our recurrent focus on the present and future of containerization makes us forget older revolutions such as the sail to steam transition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Are such revolutions comparable with each other? Do they obey similar mechanisms, in terms of spatio-temporal diffusion, port competition, and hierarchical dynamics, shipping network reorganization? Research on this is only at its eve. Our most recent research provides preliminary results using the archival corpus of the...
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Cruise shipping supply chains and the impacts of disruptions: the Caribbean
Cruise shipping supply chains have unique characteristics where product and service providers accommodate stringent requirements related to the nature of the cruise product. Since cruise ships are floating resorts that must be resupplied during their short port rotations, they require customized procurement practices. The sustainability of such practices is investigated by PortEconomics members Jean-Paul Rodrigue and Grace Wang, through the lenses of contract dynamics among actors, including sourcing patterns, consumption patterns, pricing,...
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The geography of maritime networks: a critical review
Despite early cartographical and graph-theoretical analyses of maritime flows in the 1940s and 1960s, it is only from the 2000s onwards that maritime network analysis had grown apace, backed by newly available shipping data, increased computational power, and renewed conceptual frameworks to study networks in general. The evolution of maritime network analysis, in geography and other sciences, is marked by a wide diversity of methods and themes, which we classify into three main parts. PortEconomics member Cesar Ducruet, at his latest...
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Port management and governance in a post‐COVID‐19 era: quo vadis?
In a port study on port management and governance, that is published as an editorial in the scholarly journal Maritime Economics and Logistics (MEL), PortEconomics co-director Theo Notteboom and Hercules Haralambides provide a critical assessment of some of the key issues and themes in port governance research, attempting at the same time, to propose new avenues for further port research in a post-COVID-19 era. As the authors state, "Port management governance is continuously challenged to adapt to a changing port...
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UN-ECLAC port report reveals effects of COVID-19 on Latin American and Caribbean ports
By Ricardo J. Sánchez & Eliana P. Barleta The throughput of containerized cargo in Latin American and Caribbean ports remained static in 2019, registering an increase of only 0.04% compared to the previous year, according to the Port Report launched today by ECLAC. The sample covers 36 countries and territories, with a total of 125 ports and port areas in the region. The total volume transferred in 2019 exceeded 54.2 million TEU, representing 6.5% of the total global throughput, The total volume transferred in 2019 exceeded 54.2...
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