مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد رقابت فضایی و مکمل در مناطق بندر اروپا (الزویر)

Competition between ports is nested in broader concepts of competition. A decision maker’s choice of calling at a particular port from a set of feasible alternatives is conditioned on the higher order choice of maritime over alternative modes of transportation. Not only other ports, but also other modes of traffic, other routes, and combinations of the two, are relevant substitutes. Choice of port is also subject to certain restrictions such as port capacity, availability, location, cargo handling specialization and accommodation of certain vessel sizes. Such restrictions, along with high entry barriers in the port market, dampen the intensity of competition between maritime ports. However, the development of intermodal logistics chains has tended to add flexibility to some of these restrictions. Inter-port relationships are likely to be complex, and may not always be characterized only by competition. One reason for lacking or low degrees of competition is that ports are generally considered to possess a significant degree of natural market power (Goss, 1999; Verhoeff, 1981). The tendency for ports to exploit market power in pricing practices has led to strong arguments for creating competition within ports (De Langen and Pallis, 2006). Another reason for lacking competition is that ports may rather be incentivized by co-operation than by competition. In terms of demand analysis, one might characterize a set of ports as either substitutory (in a situation where interport relationships are characterized by competition), or as complementary (in the case of co-operation).2 To illustrate the two types of relationship features in a simple example, consider a scenario where two ports X and Y are able to separately serve the same hinterlands. Standard economic reasoning says that a decrease in the generalized cost of using port X (be this the effect of an efficiency improvement, a reduced charge or something else) is likely to lead to an increase in demand for port X and a decrease in demand for port Y. A counteracting effect would be one of complementarity; a lower generalized user cost for port X results in a lower total cost for a vessel calling at both ports X and Y, increasing demand for both X and Y. This can be termed a spillover effect or a positive externality. Naturally, the example can be generalized to a large network of ports. A change in user cost for one port will affect other parts of the transportation network, and the size of this effect is related to the intensity of the relationship between the ports.