Impact of Hinterland Manufacturing on the Development of Container Ports: Evidence from the Pearl River Delta, China

Container ports and hinterland manufacturing are two important forces of the local participation in economic globalization.This study,taking the Pearl River Delta(PRD),China with an export-oriented economy as an example,applies Huff and panel regres-sion models to evaluate the impact of hinterland manufacturing on the development of container ports during the period of 1993–2019.The results show that 1)the spatial patterns of hinterlands for hub ports help to determine the distribution range and scale of economic variables that affect port throughput;2)the hinterland’s gross manufacturing output has universally positive influence on port through-put,wherein export-oriented processing and the entire manufacturing industry have significantly positive impact on port throughput in 1993–2011 and 2001–2019,respectively;3)the two internal structural factors related to an export-oriented economy,labor-intensive sectors and foreign-funded terminals,have positively moderate the direct influence of hinterland manufacturing on port throughput.Our results highlight the importance of local context in understanding port-manufacturing relationship in developing economies.Based on our findings,policy implications are further proposed to enhance port network organization in PRD.

The Present Situation and Future Development of Container Ports in the World

The Improvement of Port Management Stimulated by the Development of Container Traffic Container transport started to flourish in the 70s and grew rapidly. Comparing the traffic volume of 1990 with that of 1975, the Japanese ports handled 7. 82 million TEUs in 1990 and 1.87 million TEUs in 1975 while the "Four Small Dragonsnhandied 18. 10 million TEUs in 1990 and 1.68 million TEUs in 1975,4.2 times and 10.75 times increase respectively.

REGIONAL CONTAINER PORT COMPETITION IN A DUAL GATEWAY-PORT SYSTEM

Many ocean transportation hub systems consist of two container ports that share the container handling business in the area. The container flow passing through a port is the main measurement of the port＇s competitiveness. In this paper we adopt a Hotelling model to study the container port competition in a so-called ＂dual gateway-port system＂. The system contains two ports and two terminals, one belonging to each port. The two governments in which the two ports are located compete on cargo fees and the two terminals determine service price and service quality. We study two models with different levels of competition between the terminals. In the ftrst model, the two terminals are owned by two different operators and in the second model, the two terminals are centralized under one operator. The second model exists in practice but is not well studied in the literature. We derive the cargo fee, terminal service price, and service quality equilibria for these two models. We investigate the competition outcome sensitivity with a numerical study. The numerical results reveal that governments prefer terminals to compete with each other. If the terminals do not have competitive advantages in their service quality, then terminal centralization brings more profits to the terminal operator than the competition case.