Abstract
In 2013 Chinese government unveiled one of the biggest transport plan schemes worldwide: the One Belt One Road (OBOR) strategy, now called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This scheme includes the development of a group of specific transport and logistics corridors that encompass three different continents (i.e. Asia, Africa, and Europe) with both land and maritime corridors. Both these planned interventions are expected to greatly impact on the maritime transport between Far East and Northern Europe through new port investments (e.g. Piraeus, the proposed Venice container offshore terminal) and providing rail alternatives (e.g. Beijing-Hamburg rail service) that could impact on the geography of international trades.These modifications of current transport patterns might drastically change the overall organisation of the shipping services in the Mediterranean, increasing competition of transport alternatives (e.g. rail vs road; rail vs sea) and promoting the nodes included in the BRI. Thus, the current study aims at discussing effects of BRI on current maritime patterns with a specific focus on the effects into port competition within the Mediterranean area.
Highlights
Over the centuries, maritime transport has often been promoted as the only transport mean capable of competing for large volumes of traffics in long distance routes (e.g. Stopford, 2009)
The large diffusion of container shipping – favouring vertical and horizontal integration strategies – drastically changed these traditional elements of the shipping business, with the need for aggregations that became a paramount need for most operators, as for the case of Merges and Acquisitions (M&A) and the formation of strategic alliances (Midoro and Pitto 2000)
In the European Union, Trans-European Network is an example of such policy, with the selection of core ports and related major logistics corridors (e.g. Ferrari et al 2018)
Summary
Maritime transport has often been promoted as the only transport mean capable of competing for large volumes of traffics in long distance routes (e.g. Stopford, 2009). The new logistics corridors might affect the shipping industry in the Mediterranean and the overall transport industry at European level, as discussed by Yang et al (2018a) and Costa et al (2020) Concerning this latter issue, it is quite important to highlight how Europe seems to be central to the BRI development, being the other end of both the “road” and the “belt” (i.e., the improved maritime services and the land alternatives, respectively) of the overall strategy. All the papers have been published within the last 4 years and most of them focus either on specific case studies (mainly located in Asia) or on general network issues These latter aspects are quite important since only a limited number of papers assessed the impacts of BRI projects on European logistics (among the exceptions, Yang et al 2018a; Nežerenko and Koppel 20172) and none of them discusses the consequences of BRI in the Mediterranean area. Despite the main focus of the studies is coming more from a political perspective, transportation journals recognise the primary interest that BRI might generate for the future of logistics and transport industries
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