Container Throughput across Eastern Mediterranean Ports: National Renewable Integration, Carbon-Price-Weighted Trade Exposure, and Logistics Infrastructure, 2005-2023

Eastern Mediterranean container ports operate across heterogeneous energy, logistics, and regulatory environments, yet comparative evidence on their association with throughput remains limited.This study examines container throughput, National Renewable Integration (NRI), logistics infrastructure, and carbon-price-weighted trade exposure (CPTE) across five countries from 2005 to 2023.The baseline includes seven ports and 133 observations and uses port fixed effects with port-clustered standard errors; an eighth port is included in an unbalanced robustness extension.The study makes three contributions.First, the reviewed sources contain no records of on-site renewable generation or onshore power supply for the eight candidate ports.Therefore, the estimable renewable measure is the country-level renewable electricity share, termed NRI.Second, CPTE combines carbon-intensive, EU-oriented trade composition with the EU ETS allowance price as a common carbon-price benchmark.Third, the study evaluates these relationships within a common fixed-effects framework, while recognising the limited country-level identifying variation and testing robustness across alternative specifications.Logistics infrastructure is positively associated with throughput in the baseline, but the significance is sensitive to specification and sample.CPTE is positive rather than negative; NRI has no stable directional association; and the Beirut-specific post-2020 indicator remains negative across reported specifications and is significant under port-clustered inference.