 Density economies and transport geography: Evidence from the container shipping industryHangtian Xu and Hidekazu Itoh Journal of Urban Economics, 2018, vol. 105, issue C, 121-132 Abstract: By exploiting the 1995 Hanshin earthquake in western Japan as an exogenous shock to the container traffic of Northeast Asia, our study shows that economies of density in the transportation sector can influence transport geography. This earthquake caused great damage to the port of Kobe, resulting in a diversion of its container traffic to the nearby port of Busan, which increased markedly after this windfall. The strengthened economies of transport density therefore allowed Busan to expand its hinterland to regions whose container shipping operations had not even been directly affected by the earthquake, such as eastern Japan. The empirical evidence from the port choice dynamics in eastern Japan supports this mechanism. Substantial diversions of container traffic occurred after 1995 from the major ports in this region to the port of Busan. Furthermore, these unintended container shipping diversions led to a structural change in the manufacturing sector of related regions after the late 1990s. Keywords: Hub port; Density economies; Transportation; Northeast Asia (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:juecon:v:105:y:2018:i:c:p:121-132 DOI: 10.1016/j.jue.2017.09.002 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Urban Economics is currently edited by S.S. Rosenthal and W.C. Strange More articles in Journal of Urban Economics from Elsevier |
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