Study On The Dynamic Correlation Of China’s Coastal Ports Growth

China’s economy has grown rapidly and reached a new level since the reform and opening-up. However, there is an obvious phenomenon that regional economic development is uneven. Among China’s regional economy, eastern regional is the most developed. Policy support combined with geographic factor led to the framework. The eastern region has thousands of miles coastline and all of China’s main ports is located here. Port is the hub of different regional economy and ties them together. With the propose of the construction of the maritime Silk Road in twenty-first Century Strategy, Chinese ports are facing the unprecedented development opportunities, but also facing the direct competition with foreign ports, especially the ASEAN ports. Chinese ports should form a reasonable system and strengthen cooperation, jointly facing the challenge from foreign ports.However, the distribution and function orientation of the container ports in China is still relatively confused, and disorderly competition and duplication is a widespread phenomenon. So, to find out the dynamic correlation between ports is very important for establishing a reasonable and orderly port system.From the view of the port groups, there is cooperation among ports in the same port groups due to scale economy and competition due to the struggle for resources in the hinterland. Which force occupy the dominant position? To sort out that the relationship between ports is competition or cooperation has an important significance on avoiding disorderly competition and repeated construction.To uncover the dynamic correlation of China’s port growth and make clear that what relation is between ports, cooperation or competition, this passage use VAR, VAR Granger causality, co-integration and ECM to study the main ports of China’s eastern coastal with container throughput data from 2005Q1 to 2013Q4.Through the empirical analysis, this study found out that there is not much dynamic correlation between the main ports of China’s eastern coastal. Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenzhen and other large ports have most dynamic correlation with other ports and the development of ports present polarization effect. The interconnected ports are not only which have a geographical proximity, but also which have a long distance between each other, showing that the correlation between the ports are beyond the limits of geographical location. There is always a siphon effect between large port and ports which have links with them, and connected ports are more likely to play a role as "box source provider". The links between ports in Yangtze River Delta port group and in Pearl River Delta port group is very close, and the competition is very fierce. But ports in Ring Bohai port group show more cooperative relationship.