Relationships among Major Container Ports in Asia Region

Abstract

Significant changes in the shipping market cause port authorities facing new challenges and opportunities. Container traffic to and from other parts of Asia is expected to grow more rapidly than the world average, and the intra-Asian trade in particular will continue to outperform global container growth. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships among major Asia ports based on the historical port throughput data by using a set of time series analysis. The results would assist port authorities concerned in understanding the port position and managing the partners. The findings indicate that there were no long-term equilibrium relationship existed among Asia ports, but short-term relationships did exist among them. Through generalized forecast error variance decomposition, it is found that many of these ports can explain the variance with each other which may help port authorities to gain more insights about the sources of errors in throughput forecasting.