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Anatomy of a Port Disaster: The Tianjin Port Explosions
By Jean-Paul Rodrigue Successive explosions at the port of Tianjin, the third largest in the world in terms of tonnage and the 10th largest in terms of container volumes, resulted in deadly blasts in the Chinese port city. PortEconomics member Jean-Paul Rodrigue, describes the anatomy of the disaster - and provides his input during an inverview on the national Chinese national television (CCTV) on August 17 on this topic. "Ports are significant consumers of land involving terminal operations as well as port-centric logistics...
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PortEconomics @ IAME2015 conference (24-26 August, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
The 2015 Annual Conference of the International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME) starts on Monday 24 August in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, with PortEconomics member preparing to present the latest of their port research. The theme of this year's conference organised by the MIT Malaysia Institute for Supply Chain innovation is "The Role of Maritime Clusters and Innovation in Shaping Future Global Trade". Maritime economists from all five continents are gathering together for attending the flagship annual event of their international...
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13th Port Performance Research Network (PPRN) meeting
The 13th meeting of the Port Performance Research Network (PPRN) takes place on Sunday, 23rd August, in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, with PortEconomics members meeting together with fellow maritime economists interested in port research at the eve of the 2015 Annual Conference of the International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME). PPRN is an informal network of maritime economists interested in issues of port policy. It was established at the IAME 2001 meeting in Hong Kong to undertake empirical testing of port governance, and is...
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Traffic decline in container ports: the exception or the new normal?
By Theo Notteboom Recently, Hamburg announced that container throughput in the Elbe port saw a decline of 6.8% in the first half of 2015 compared to the same period last year, mainly caused by a sharp decrease in the trade volumes with Russia and China. The container business is generally considered as a growth sector. Over the past decades, ports around the world have become used to welcoming traffic growth year after year. A decline in container traffic is considered as unusual. But how often have ports reported cargo losses over the...
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Port performance management: mind the gap
Port research has been focusing increasingly on performance management. A great deal of port studies have pointed out that port performance management has evolved from mere financial measurements to a multitude of indicators, and that the subject being measured can range from micro-level (an organization), meso-level (industry) to macro-level (regional or national) performance. PortEconomics member Michael Dooms, along with Mychal Langenus (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), on their latest port study - published in the International Journal of...
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Concession agreements and market entry in the container terminal industry
The capabilities and strategies required for obtaining a concession to operate a container terminal in a seaport is the theme of the study conducted by the three PortEconomics co-directors, Thanos Pallis, Theo Notteboom and Peter de Langen, and is now part of a new volume "Port Management", just published by Palgrave. The volume is edited by Prof Hercules Haralambides (Erasmus University and Port of Brindisi), and brings together a collection of seminal papers from Palgrave's journal, Maritime Economics and Logistics. It is a...
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Ports of call combinations on the Europe-Asia trade
By Theo Notteboom When container shipping lines design a weekly service between Asia and North Europe, they have to decide how many and which ports of call to include in the schedule. On the North European side, they typically ensure they serve the biggest port regions. Therefore, almost all liner services on the North Europe – Far East trade have ports of call in the Rhine-Scheldt Delta (Rotterdam, Antwerp, Zeebrugge), the north German multi-port gateway region (Hamburg, Bremerhaven, Wilhelmshaven) and the southeast coast of the UK...
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How dependent are north-european ports on containers?
By Theo Notteboom Discussions on port development, planning and competitiveness often tend to revolve around container flows. Quite a few ports around the world have developed some kind of 'container fetish', implying they have developed a very strong focus on container throughput. But how dependent are ports on container traffic? The infographic shows the evolution in some of the main north-European container ports. Three dimensions are presented. The vertical axis shows the container dependency or the share of container throughput in the...
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