Abstract

Would improvements in port performance increase trade in countries on the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans? Previous studies attempted to answer this question using ad hoc measures of port efficiency that do not control for the actual use of port assets or measures that can be very noisy. To avoid these problems, this paper builds a measure of economic efficiency based on the use of port inputs to deliver port output. Using data envelop analysis, it ranks countries on the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans in terms of their port efficiency, and assesses the effect of increased efficiency. It finds that becoming as efficient as the country with the most efficient port sector would reduce their average maritime transport costs by up to 14 percent and increase their exports by up to 2.2 percent. Document type: Book

Abstract

We estimate the Anderson and van Wincoop model of trade by using the data on the bilateral export flows from 26 Turkish regions to 180 countries for the years 2002 through to 2010. Regional transportation and communication infrastructure capacity, the positioning of point infrastructure in a region, and geography are explicitly accounted for. Our results highlight that land infrastructure, air transport capacity, and private maritime infrastructure presence, together with the distance of regional economies to exit nodes such as ports and airports, are important determinants of export performance. Based on our preferred regression where multilateral resistance terms are accounted for, we estimate that increases in the current land infrastructure, air transport capacity, and number of private ports of 1 per cent increases exports approximately by 0.38 per cent, 0.14 per cent, and 0.045 per cent respectively. Keywords: Infrastructure; trade; regions; transportation co Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

The South West of England is a very extensive region with constraints in terms of its transport network. It is imperative if the region is to optimise its economic development for transport services to fully utilise all transport modes, not least short sea shipping. To achieve this utilisation will require, inter alia, investment in the region’s port infrastructure. In addition, the region is well-placed geographically in relation to a number of other European Union countries to develop seaborne trade links with them. If this can be supported both by the development of coastal shipping links between regional ports and the incremental capability of rail and road transport within the region then substantial increased economic activity for the region could result. Moreover, it will be beneficial if the region’s ports could act as a network, optimising the contribution each port can make. This in no way precludes healthy competition between the ports. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

Agriculture remains an important economic sector in Africa, employing a large share of the labor force and earning foreign exchange. Among others, transport connectivity has long been a crucial constraint in Africa. In theory, railways have a particularly important role to play in shipping freight and passengers at low cost. However, most African railways were in virtual bankruptcy by the 1990s. Using a large sample of data comprised of more than 190,000 households over eight years in Ethiopia, the paper estimates the impacts of rail transport on agricultural production. Methodologically, the paper takes advantage of the historical event that a major rail line connecting the country to the regional hub, the Port of Djibouti, was abandoned in the 2000s. With spatially highly disaggregated fixed effects and instrumental variables incorporated, an agricultural production function is estimated. The elasticity with respect to port connectivity is estimated at 0.276. The use of fertilizer is also found to increase with transport cost reduction, supporting the fact that a large amount of fertilizer is imported to Ethiopia. Document type: Book

Abstract

This paper is an annual publication issued by the Microeconomic Analysis service of the National Bank of Belgium. The Flemish maritime ports (Antwerp, Ghent, Ostend, Zeebrugge), the Autonomous Port of Liège and the port of Brussels play a major role in their respective regional economies and in the Belgian economy, not only in terms of industrial activity but also as intermodal centers facilitating the commodity flow. This update paper provides an extensive overview of the economic importance and development of the Flemish maritime ports, the Liège port complex and the port of Brussels for the period 2006 - 2011, with an emphasis on 2011. Focusing on the three major variables of value added, employment and investment, the report also provides some information based on the social balance sheet and an overview of the financial situation in these ports as a whole. These observations are linked to a more general context, along with a few cargo statistics. Annual accounts data from the Central Balance Sheet Office were used for the calculation of direct effects, the study of financial ratios and the analysis of the social balance sheet. The indirect effects of the activities concerned were estimated in terms of value added and employment, on the basis of data from the National Accounts Institute. As a result of the underlying calculation method the changes of indirect employment and indirect value added can differ from one another. (…) After the upturn in 2010, maritime cargo traffic in the Flemish ports continued to rise, albeit at a slower pace in 2011. Direct value added declined in the four ports in Flanders as a whole. Both maritime and non-maritime clusters as a whole were down. The only increase in value added occurred in the port of Zeebrugge. The value added of the non-maritime clusters in each port declined, while in the maritime cluster, the port of Antwerp was the only one to register a steep drop. Direct employment in the Flemish ports as a whole declined during the year 2011. This is true of both the maritime and non-maritime cluster. Only the port of Ghent registered a rise in employment in both clusters. Investment contracted in the Flemish ports as a whole for the third year in a row. The decline in investment was between 7 and 13 percent in the ports of Antwerp, Ghent and Ostend, whereas Zeebrugge recorded a negative rate of one-fifth in its investment levels in 2011. The volume of cargo handled in the port of Liège increased slightly in 2011. Direct value added rose in both clusters, while employment registered a decline in the maritime cluster and a rise in the nonmaritime cluster. After falling in 2010, investment picked up again in 2011 in both clusters. The volume of cargo handled at the port of Brussels rose in 2011. Value added in the maritime cluster was up but contracted in the non-maritime cluster. Employment increased in both clusters. The drop in investment recorded since 2009 continued throughout 2011. This report provides a comprehensive account of these issues, giving details for each economic sector, although the comments are confined to the main changes that occurred in 2011. Document type: Book

Abstract

Because of their critical strategic role, ports have all traditionally been subject to some form of government control even if the legal form and the intensity of this control have varied across countries. The member countries of the European Union have not been different from the rest of the world in this respect. A significant difference however is the recurrent effort to integrate, in a coordinated way, the port sector in a trans-European transport network (TEN-T) through the adoption of a common legal framework. In this context, if the objective of the reforms is to ensure that port networks, integrated in combined transport networks, become competitors of the road network, the concept of port efficiency becomes central. This paper provides an overview of the evolution of the European Port Legislation and shows how comparative economic measures can be used to highlight the scope for port efficiency improvements, essential to allow short sea shipping transport to compete with road transport in Europe. To our knowledge, this paper is also the first effort of estimating technical efficiency of European Port Authorities. The average port efficiency in 2002 was estimated to be around 60%, denoting that ports could have handled 40% more traffic with the same resources. Maritime Economics & Logistics (2007) 9, 148–171. doi:10.1057/palgrave.mel.9100177 Document type: Book

Abstract

One of the most important challenges for network administrators is the identification of applications behind the Internet traffic. This identification serves for many purposes as in network security, traffic engineering and monitoring. The classical methods based on standard port numbers or deep packet inspection are unfortunately becoming less and less efficient because of encryption and the utilization of non standard ports. In this paper we come up with an online iterative probabilistic method that identifies applications quickly and accurately by only using the size of packets. Our method associates a configurable confidence level to the port number carried in the transport header and is able to consider a variable number of packets at the beginning of a flow. By verification on real traces we observe that even in the case of no confidence in the port number, a very high accuracy can be obtained for well known applications after few packets were examined. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book