Special issue on ‘Current issues in ports and maritime transportation’

This special issue is the fruit of the World Conference on Transport Research that was held in 2019 in Mumbai. It brings together a series of eight papers that each tackles a current issue in ports and/ or maritime transportation. Six of the papers deal with infrastructure and terminal efficiency, which is a clear illustration of how crucial efficiency is in today’s port world, under increasing pressure by ever-larger shipping companies with ever-growing ships. A second issue is the climate, where transport and shipping, in particular, are the most important sources of the main emissions. A third and final issue is port co-operation, particularly with a view to the hinterland. The papers have in common that each uses a distinct modelling approach to answer their main research question. The first paper, by van Hassel et al., focuses on the impact of increasing ship sizes on the need for bigger infrastructure, here in particular the expansion of the Panama Canal. That Canal, together with the Suez Canal, is one of the two shortcuts on the connections between the world’s continents. Therefore, the impact of its bottleneck role, on the one hand, or its expansion on the other hand, is felt even on the other side of the globe. This paper shows how the expanded Panama Canal not only turns US port competition totally upside down but also impacts on port competition in other continents. In the US, for trades with Europe, US East Coast ports suddenly come into the picture for a large part of the US hinterland. The reasoning, of course, also goes the other way around for trades with Asia. But more strikingly, even though with a shift that is smaller, there is an impact on port competition within Europe. Turning to ports, four papers on this issue deal with a case study on port efficiency. The four papers also apply different methods and make linkages with different factors. The first paper, by Fernández et al., makes an analysis for Spanish ports. The authors apply a two-stage DEA method, and make a link with container specialisation. Spanish ports appear to feature a high heterogeneity in cargo specialisation. On the output side, the main commodity types as they shape shipping markets are used. On the input side, two factors are used: labour and intermediate consumptions. High-complex ports appear to have a higher overall efficiency. Low-complex ports have higher pure technical efficiency than overall technical efficiency. Third, it is observed that technologies between ports have converged over the past decades. The main lesson from the research is that overcapacity is a big issue, especially in smaller ports. The second port efficiency paper, by Diakomihalis et al., makes an application to Greek ports. The authors apply ordinal logistic regression and one-way ANOVA, combined with DEA. On the input side, they use four types of financial ratios, dealing, respectively, with liquidity, activity profitability, and viability. The authors observed that the four ordinal logistic regressions did not show any differences in the evaluation of port efficiency; there was a difference in the fixed assets ratio between the pre-crisis and in-crisis years. In addition, the DEA results suggest that the ports remain inefficient, though the scores for the pre-crisis, in-crisis, and the entire period of investigation vary. One certain implication is that the government should introduce at least some element of private management if the ports are to maintain or increase their efficiency. The third paper on port efficiency, by Görçün, focuses on the Black Sea container ports. Two multi-criteria decision-making models are applied: the first consists of the entropy and OCRA technique, while the second model consists of the Entropy and EATWIOS method. A long list of input factors is considered, next to the outputs. It can be seen that output factors are more MARITIME POLICY & MANAGEMENT 2021, VOL. 48, NO. 5, 607–609 https://doi.org/10.1080/03088839.2021.1953176