Revisiting urban hierarchy and specialization from a maritime perspective

César Ducruet

Maritime Policy & Management, 2020, vol. 47, issue 3, 371-387

Abstract: Port–city relationships have attracted paramount attention from a variety of scientific disciplines for several decades, such as geography, history, planning, regional science, sociology, and economics to name but a few. Yet, the extent to which maritime traffic specialization obeys the same spatial distribution than other economic activities remains underexplored today. This article tackles these lacunae head-on by proposing an empirical analysis of the way vessel tonnage per main categories of flows (e.g. containers, bulks, passengers) coincides with the demographic size of the world’s coastal and inland city-regions, using novel data on global inter-port vessel movements and harmonized population data over the period 1977–2008. Our main results confirm that such traffic is far from being randomly distributed, as its volume, value, and diversity concentrate at the top of the urban hierarchy. This research motivates the need to further integrate physical connectivity into the study of cities and their development mechanisms.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03088839.2019.1693065 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:marpmg:v:47:y:2020:i:3:p:371-387

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TMPM20

DOI: 10.1080/03088839.2019.1693065

Access Statistics for this article

Maritime Policy & Management is currently edited by Dr Kevin Li and Heather Leggate McLaughlin

More articles in Maritime Policy & Management from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().