Which categories of port industry revenues directly support the movement of goods? Port tariffs (charges) can be used to identify expenditures on services that are essential to moving cargo through port systems – and this is the theme of the latest port study of PortEconomics member Grace Wang, co-authored with Wen-Huei Chang (US Army Corp of Engineers), Yue Cui (Michigan State University).
Conversion factors were developed to standardize port tariffs and build expenditure profiles based on these standardized charges. Case studies were conducted for sensitivity analysis to simulate economic impacts based on changes to cargo flows through the ports with the tariff estimated spending profiles. Compared to the traditional survey approach, using tariff data in place of traditional surveys provides a time-effective way to capture port characteristics, business structure and flows, as well as to extract rates information for economic impact analysis.
The port study was presented at the annual Conference of the International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME 2016) held in Hamburg, Germany and it is available and can be downloaded @PortEconomics.
