Complexity In The Global Container Shipping Network: Regions, Ports, And Flows

Container shipping is a backbone of the global economy, as about 70% of the seaborne trade by value is transported by container vessels. Thus, it makes the global container shipping network, resulting from worldwide liner shipping activities, a practical looking glass for analyzing the structure of international trade. However, existing empirical research on the global container shipping network based on inter-port container flows is scarce. Spatial propertities are inherent in the global container shipping network, wherein port and port system consisting of ports within a certain geographical scope can be regarded as the basic and wider node unit respectively, and worldwide inter-port and inter-port system container shipping connections constitute the spatial structure of container flows in the global container shipping network taking a micro and macro view respectively. Therefore, should the global container shipping network be regarged as a system, ports, shipping regions, and container flows are its three essential elements. For this reason, based on service networks of liner carriers in the world, the present dissertation investigates the complexity in the global container shipping network by analyzing its topological structure and spatial structure of container flows, from a combining perspective of complex network theory and geography. It wishes to provide empirical results which could benefit the development of Chinese coastal container ports and also the capacity deployment of Chinese international container carriers, and thus to facilitate the long-run development of China's maritime shipping sector. Focusing on the stated research purpose, the major work of this dissertation is as follows:(1) Based on rational division of world shipping regions, the evolution of regional inequality in the global container shipping network is investigated by measuring and mapping the position changes of the world regions during the period from 2001 to 2012. The concept of "position" of a given region is made operational by analyzing and comparing traffic development, centrality, and dominance within the context of the global container shipping network. Results show that, total traffic volume, a widely used indicator, is inaccurate in reflecting the actual regional development in terms of maritime shipping. In spite of the superiority of East Asia over the other regions in terms of the total traffic volume, the position of East Asia in the global container shipping network did not achieve an equivalent improvement as its total traffic volume during the research period; in fact, the former lags behind the latter. North American West Coast, North American East Coast, and Australasia are regions whose positions declined the most. On the contrary, a few emerging regions that once in the margin of the global container shipping network are attracting rising attention from the world, i.e. South American North Coast, West Africa, Southern Africa, South American East Coast and West Asia.(2) Topological centrality of the global container shipping network is investigated through analyzing the centrality of individual ports in the topological structure of the network. For systematically measuring port position in the network topology, an indicator named overall topological centrality is introduced here, based on three basic node centrality indicators from complex network theory (i.e. degree, betweenness and closeness) and their correlation coefficients with port container throughput respectively. According to the result of the overall topological centrality analysis, global container ports can be divided into three hierarchies: those of centrality value higher than 0.2, between 0.15 and 0.2, and lower than 0.15. Each accounting for 3.18%,14.00% and 82.82% of the world ports respectively. Ports of Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Shanghai are considered to be in the topological center of the global container shipping network. In addition, indicators of overall topological centrality and container throughput are proved to be complementary in assessing the level of importance of a given port in a container shipping network, by analyzing the ranking discrepancies of world ports based on the two indicators respectively.(3) Complexity in the spatial structure of container flows in the global container shipping network is investigated through analysis of spatial arrangement on container flows by port, traffic concentration by region, and dominant flow distribution in the global container shipping network. The mode of spatial arrangement on container flows by a given port is defined by the proportional distribution of its container traffic over ports inside and outside the region where it belongs; and specificlly, it can be clarified into three modes, i.e. outer oriented, balanced, and inner oriented. Results show that, among ports with container traffic higher than a certain level, the outer oriented are of stronger influence in the global container shipping network than the other two. Herfindahl-Hirschman Index is used here to analyze the levels of traffic concentration in world shipping regions, including inner traffic (i.e. inter-port traffic within a given region), outer traffic (i.e. inter-port traffic between ports of a given region and ports outside the region) and total traffic. Results show that, the level of total traffic concentration of a shipping region is mainly determined by that of outer traffic concentration. Port clusters are revealed through the dominant flow analysis, and according to which, the global container shipping network is divided into five port hierarchies. The first hierarchy consists of 30 ports, namely central ports from individual clusters, e.g. ports of Shanghai, Rotterdam, New York, Valencia, Santos, and Tauranga.(4) Based on significant flow analysis, a quantitative method for measuring levels of hub dependency and vulnerability in the distribution of inter-regional container flows is introduced. According to the distributions of significant container flows between China and each overseas region, levels of hub dependency of China's international container shipping connections by overseas region on relevant Chinese and forein hub ports, and further, levels of vulnerability in China's international container shipping connections by overseas region are quantitively analyzed. In addition, levels of the overall dependency of China's international container shipping connections on individual Chinese international container ports are calculated, and according to which we catergory these ports into three hierarchies, i.e. the super hub, the sub hub, and the non-hub. Specifically, super hubs are ports of Shanghai, Shenzhen, Ningbo-Zhoushan and Hong Kong, sub hubs are ports of Guangzhou, Xiamen, Qingdao, Tianjin and Dalian, and the rest of the Chinese international container ports are considered as non-hubs.