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Project
Southern African Container Port Dynamics.
The political and social reforms in Southern Africa have brought tremendous economic opportunities and spurred infrastructure development to the region. Given that 41% of the maritime container traffic of the entire continent is captured in Southern Africa, Port development is a crucial enabler of trade, economic growth and employment to the region. The ongoing doctoral research is focused on the regional container port development in Southern Africa, specifically the ports of Toamasina, Port Louis, Maputo, Durban, Nctqura, Cape Town and Walvis Bay. The main objective of my research is to critically evaluate the key drivers of port development in developing countries from five perspectives. (1) Container traffic flows and shift share competitive dynamics, (2) Corridor and Hinterland dynamics (3) Port Institutional reformation (4) Maritime Network perspectives and (5) Financing sources for port development. This five dimensional port analysis will then be used to provide clear policy recommendations to policy makers from all five perspectives of port development. Much of the current port development research is largely focused on European, Asian or North American cases and as such regional African port systems are under researched. This PhD project follows the 'paper based' approach. Separate academic research papers (peer reviewed by academic journals or academic conferences) which were written in accordance with the broad theme of. The research methods applied are both qualitative and quantitative research methods. In terms of the contribution this research , two of the five papers apply existing quantitative techniques for the first time to this Southern African regional case (Regional shift share analysis and graph theory). The remaining three chapters developed new qualitative frameworks or quantitative research models and applied these new techniques to test hypothesis/answer the research questions of this study. Overall, this research provides a relevant and meaningful contribution to regional policy makers and port stakeholders port development endeavors and also presents a contribution to academic research in the field .
Date:15 Jul 2014 → 19 Dec 2014
Keywords:TRANSPORTCORRIDORS, SEA PORT
Disciplines:Applied economics, Economic development, innovation, technological change and growth