Revisiting Inter-Port Relationships under the New Economic Geography Research Framework

Abstract

Chapter one by Cesar Ducruet, Theo Notteboom and Peter de Langen, the New Economic Geography (NEG) is seen as a possible bridge for a better integration between economic geography literature and port studies. The authors demonstrate that NEG has distanced itself from traditional economic geography in the early 1990s by applying a modelling approach to the explanation of changing spatial structures, and by attempting to put economic geography in the economic mainstream. By bringing together international trade theories, micro-economic theories, and spatial analysis, it proposes a renewed framework explaining the uneven distribution of activities across geographical space, understood in terms of agglomeration, dispersion, and regional integration. This chapter confronts NEG with two important sets of port research: the changing concentration of traffic within a port system, and the uneven agglomeration of economic activities around port areas