Liner shipping provides reliable and efficient services to the global businesses. Such services are enabled through continuous pursue of economies of scale, which leads to many fundamental changes in liner shipping industry: increasingly larger ships deployed in the major east-west routes controlled by fewer number of big players in even bigger alliances. This brought port operators serious concerns that these larger ships may reduce the service areas and calling smaller number of ports.
China is the largest trading nation with many coastal container ports. This concern made every major ports to invest heavily expand their capacity and try to become the regional hub and be able to accommodate the large vessels. Such a race may result in overcapacity in container ports.
This seminar analyzes the service regions and calling ports for the global liners serving China. We first describe the current allocation of liner shipping capacities in Chinese port clusters. An ordered logit –panel data model was constructed to analyze the main factors in port cluster coverage, together with a liner model for the number of port calls in Chinese Coast, for all the liner shipping services to and from China from 2011 and 2015. Our major findings show that the larger ships or longer routes along have significant positive impact on the service regions and ports. However, the interaction term between these two variables has negative significant impact. This implies that increase ship size may lead to reduce the number of port clusters and number of ports only when the size and round trip time are higher than some minimum range.
Dr. Meifeng Luo is currently an Associate Professor of Maritime Studies in the Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is also the Director of IMC-Frank Tsao Maritime Library and R&D Center in the department, as well as the Associate Editor of Maritime Policy and Management—the flagship journal of international shipping and port research. He had worked as a scientist in the State Oceanic Administration for 12 years after earned Bachelor degree in Marine Science from Tong Ji University, Shanghai. Then, he earned his MSc degree in Maritime Administration and Environmental Protection in World Maritime University, Malmo, Sweden, and PhD in Environmental Economics in University of Rhode Island, U.S.A.. His research is mainly focused on maritime economics, environment, policy and management, including shipping market analysis and forecast, port demand analysis and port competition. His research result has been published in many prestigious peer-reviewed academic journals, including Transportation Research Part B and A, Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, Transport Policy, Marine Policy, Transportmetrica A: Transportation Science, Maritime Policy and Management, etc..