Imposing means \u2018forcing (an unwelcome decision or ruling) on someone\u2019. I fundamentally fail to see how mega-ships force infrastructure investments on the public sector.<\/p>\n
Governments as well as government-owned port authorities have an obvious choice about making investments in infrastructure. There is no innate need to deepen entry channels, raise bridges and widen basins. When the costs of such investments are prohibitive, governments and port authorities can decide not to make investments.<\/p>\n
The point that is not really discussed in the report is that they seldom do so, and probably for the wrong reasons. That may be because ports are convinced that they would lose all their traffic unless they are ready to handle the largest size of vessels. However, that argument is flawed; exactly because the reduction in slot costs is moderate, load centres with superior access to hinterlands are very likely to continue to receive ships and handle significant volumes.<\/p>\n
Take as an example the ports in the Black Sea and the Great Lakes. They continue to be served directly with the maximum size of ships that can pass the Bosporus and the Saint Lawrence Seaway respectively. It is therefore hard to argue that mega ships inevitably destroy the value of existing port and hinterland infrastructures. Indeed, it is clear that the most inefficient global port system is a system with a relatively limited number of ports capable of handling the mega-ships and a larger number of ports that handle smaller size classes.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, it is important to note that a substantial number of ports that handle the large bulk ships already have the maritime access to accommodate container mega-ships. So the underlying issue may be that governments feel that investments are imposed on them, instead of making balanced choices on infrastructure expansion. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
COMMENT: The OECD report on the effects on mega-ships provides valuable insights for all players in the port industry. While I do not wish to discuss those, I would like to focus on an \u2013 in my view – important flaw in the report: the suggestion that mega ships impose infrastructure costs on the public sector, writes Peter de Langen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-9307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-analyst"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9307"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=9307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}