Thematic Area

November 16th, 2018
Thematic Area

PortEconomics member, and winner of the 2018 Onassis prize in Shipping, Mary Brooks provides her views on liner shipping industry, in her interview reported via a podcast produced by Supplychainbrain.com. "For the ocean shipping business today, it’s tough enough navigating the rough waters caused by economic cycles. But do carriers sometimes make their own waves? Container shipping is an expensive business. Capital costs are immense, and ships must be planned and built well in advance of their entry into the trades. Matching supply with...
November 9th, 2018
Thematic Area

By Theo Notteboom Belgian and Dutch container ports are located in the Rhine-Scheldt Delta, the largest container port region in Europe in volume terms. Dutch and Belgian ports together handled 25.8 million TEU in 2017 or 7.9% more than in 2016. The Belgian-Dutch port region recorded a year-on-year growth of 6.2% in Q1-Q3 2018, so growth remains strong. In 2017, 23.9% of the total European container port traffic was handled by Belgian and Dutch ports. With these figures, the Rhine-Scheldt Delta port region is the most important port...
November 6th, 2018
Thematic Area

With the importance of corporate social responsibility being increasingly recognised, PortEconomics member Grace Wang co-authored along with Xiao Yi and Kevin Li (Chung-Ang University), a study that aims to help a cruise company identify social and environmental issues that present risks and opportunities, while taking into consideration the most concerning environmental issues to the external stakeholders. A Super-slack-based measure model, combined with the Malmquist productivity index, is applied to measure environmental efficiency in...
October 30th, 2018
Thematic Area

The Mediterranean has been one of the most active trading areas for millennia. Trade- and by extension connectivity- between Mediterranean riparian countries is one of the oldest and most studied topics in economic history. The Mediterranean has complex trade patterns and routes- but with key differences from the past. It is no longer an isolated world economy: it is both a trading area and a transit area linking Europe and North Africa with the rest of the world through the hub-and-spoke structure of maritime...
October 29th, 2018
Thematic Area

By Mary Brooks First published @theconversation.com In March, Transport Minister Marc Garneau announced the launch of the Ports Modernization Review, a series of consultations, round-tables and meetings re-examining Canada’s port authority system. Recent studies of port governance have shown that there is no one right governance model for ports. Last year, my colleagues and I conducted a review of port reform around the globe. We concluded that there are many models that deliver the best port services in terms of trade efficiency...
October 24th, 2018
Thematic Area

Almost from its inception, there has been a clear upward trend in the disruptive force of the container during its use. However, a relative decrease in container movement has been seen in recent years, the explanation of which goes beyond disturbances in the world economy. PortEconomics member Ricardo J. Sánchez along with Eliana Barleta, note that the inter-annual change in throughput with respect to changes in GDP is declining. To understand this phenomenon, Ricardo and Eliana have examined variations in containerization, notably factors...
October 22nd, 2018
Thematic Area

Efficiency improvements are inherent to the sustainability of global supply chains. Supply chains are highly dependent on a diversity of material flows handled by numerous actors (suppliers, carriers, manufacturers, distributors, etc.) and the efficiency of these flows impacts the environmental performance of the supply chain. Yet, there is no particularly clear strategy about improving the efficiency of supply chains, notably from an environmental perspective. The debate about whether environmental efficiency is better achieved through...
October 18th, 2018
Thematic Area

The innovation ecosystem as an undervalued driver of port competitiveness presented PortEconomics co-director Peter de Langen during the 107th AAPA Convention hosted by port and the city of Valparaíso, Chile in 7-10 October 2018. Peter gave emphasis in the at the importance of the ecosystems services and the industries that can be attracted to the port ecosystem, while he presented the integrated approach to innovation performance of the port complex via a graphic. Download Peter's presentation and find out more!...
October 15th, 2018
Thematic Area

Social Media (SM) provide undoubted opportunities for fostering firms’ relationships with their customers, and online customer engagement (CE) has become a widespread objective when developing communication strategies for firms operating in business where customer references, word-of-mouth (WoM) and feedbacks are predictors of success, such as in the case of travel and tourism business. In this perspective, the cruise industry constitutes a valuable field for empirical investigation related to online CE, due to its...
October 8th, 2018
Thematic Area

By Jean-Paul Rodrigue Automation is an emerging trend in port terminal development, but taking place at different scale, pace and locations. There are various degrees of automation and in many ways automation is present in a large number of terminals depending how it is defined and if it focuses on infrastructure (e.g. stacking cranes) or information systems (e.g. yard management). The most common definition classifies terminals as fully or semi automated, which is a rather partial one. For instance, a fully automated terminals is...
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