A capacity-based measure of container port accessibility

Exacerbated by a global trend towards greater market concentration in shipping and port operation, competition between container ports has intensified. In evaluating port competitiveness, minimal consideration has been given to the accessibility of individual container ports to the wider maritime container transportation network. This paper analyses the accessibility of the world's top 10 container ports as an exemplar application and proposes a framework for the assessment of port competitiveness that involves supplementing extant quantitative determinants (such as port prices, generalised inland logistics costs and estimates of relative efficiency) with a formulated index that yields accessibility measures for individual container ports.