1887

OECD Regional Development Working Papers

Working papers from the Regional Development Policy Division of the OECD cover a full range of topics including regional statistics and analysis, urban governance and economics, rural governance and economics, and multi-level governance. Depending on the programme of work, the papers can cover specific topics such as regional innovation and networks, the determinants of regional growth or fiscal consolidation at the sub-national level.

English

Ports and Regional Development

A European Perspective

This paper studies the impact of port activity on regional employment, analysing approximately 560 western European regions, including the largest OECD European ports (116 ports), from 2000-06. The empirical analysis is based on a set of employment equations using the Blundell and Bond (1998) GMM-System estimator that takes into account persistence effects in employment, regional unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity and endogeneity of port activity.

Our main findings are (1) regional employment is positively correlated to port throughput, while the number of passengers is not; (2) the impact of port throughput on employment might depend on the institutional characteristics of each port, with private ports having the largest impact on regional employment of the host region if compared with those operating under different governance models (“Hanseatic”, “Latin”); (3) there is a higher impact of port throughput when liquid bulk is not considered; and (4) the main results are confirmed when service and manufacturing employment rather than total employment are considered.

English

Keywords: regional development, regional growth, ports, transportation
JEL: R41: Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics / Transportation Economics / Transportation: Demand, Supply, and Congestion; Travel Time; Safety and Accidents; Transportation Noise; L91: Industrial Organization / Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities / Transportation: General; O47: Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth / Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity / Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence; R11: Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics / General Regional Economics / Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes; H54: Public Economics / National Government Expenditures and Related Policies / National Government Expenditures and Related Policies: Infrastructures; Other Public Investment and Capital Stock
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