Research In Theory And Methodology Of Port Competence And Its Evolution In China

Along with the development of global trade, competition between ports is getting increasingly violent, which has now reached a perfervid state. Therefore, a port in our country is facing unprecedented pressure. Not only does port competence play an extremely key role in the regional competence, but also influences the national competence deeply. For the purpose of analyzing the conditions of competition between ports in China and providing rewarding consultant suggestions that may help those ports concerned develop further, the research of port competence and its evolution has been conducted in this paper.At the moment, there are still a lot of gaps and shortcomings in the field of the research of port competence and its evolution. With regard to the present situation that attaches more importance to the static state analysis and lacks systematic dynamic studies, much more time and energies have been devoted to port competence and its evolution from the perspective of the development of ports. The main contents are as follows:Beginning with the economical character of port competition, the paper firstly analyses five competitive forces of port industry, and gives a new connotation of port competence, then dynamic circular theory of port competence and the general model are put forward. This is the theoretical framework for the whole thesis. Through extensive reading combined with the consultant expertise, this dissertation analyzes in detail the makeup of port competence system which comprises resource,structure and capacity sub-systems and their mechanism are revealed respectively. Combined with the traits of Chinese ports, a comprehensive evaluation index system is constructed, which is a dynamic and all-round reflection for port competence with the consideration of both current level and potential. The evaluation of port competence is a very complex macro-system, so this paper has adopted the SPA similarity approach for evaluation. The present SPA similarity model still has some weakness and for this reason, some improvements have been made accordingly. The fifth chapter mainly deals with port sustainable competence, a two-dimension evaluation model is established to scale a port's development level and potential. Chapter 6 studies the characteristics, qualification, process of self-organization and path dependence of port competence's evolution. And this chapter also constructs a model, which provides facilities to evaluate the synergetic degree between the three sub-systems. The seventh chapter of this paper applies what has been investigated above to Tianjin port. The other eight coastal ports are chosen for the sake of the comparative studies as to their abilities to compete. Challenges and shortcomings are pointed out for Tianjin port after the evaluation of synergetic degree between three sub-systems, port competence scores and port sustainable competence analysis. Only with the three dimensional synergetic upgrade can port competence be advanced quickly. At last, corresponding countermeasures and suggestions aimed at raising port competence are offered.