| Author: | Han, Tingting |
| Title: | A study on three contemporary issues in the shipping industry : cost, COVID-19, online platform |
| Advisors: | Ji, Ping (ISE) Yang, Dong (LMS) Lu, Chin Shan (LMS) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2022 |
| Subject: | Shipping -- Management Shipping -- Costs Shipping -- Technological innovations COVID-19 (Disease) -- Economic aspects Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering |
| Pages: | xiv, 124 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | This dissertation consists of three independent studies associated with maritime transportation changes. It aims to provide policy implications regarding cost studies, impact of COVID-19, and digitization in maritime transportation. Despite their indispensability to international trade, no comprehensive review of maritime and airline freight cost analysis has ever been conducted. The first study reviews and summarizes cost modelling, studies investigate these two industries and classifies the models into item-based cost formulations and aggregated cost formulations. We further compare the different models in order to identify general cost forms within the two industries. We also analyze how these cost models evolve over time and provide frequently used databases. This study also explains the underlying justifications for model specification, and outlines future research directions in cost modelling of these two industries. The recent experience of lockdowns during COVID-19 highlights the prolonged impact a pandemic could have on ports and the shipping industry. The second study uses port call data derived from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) reports from the world's 30 largest container ports to quantify both the immediate and long-term impact of national COVID-19 lockdown policies on global shipping flows. The analysis uses the Difference-in-Difference (DID) and combined regression discontinuity design (RDD)-DID models to represent the effects of lockdown policies. The combination of RDD and DID models is particularly effective because it can mitigate time trends in the data, e.g., the Chinese New Year effect on Chinese ports. This study further examines the potential shock propagation effects, namely, how lockdown policy in one country (i.e., China) can affect the number of port calls in other countries. We categorize ports in other countries into a high-connectivity (with Chinese ports) group and a low-connectivity group, using a proposed connectivity index with China derived from individual vessel trajectories obtained from the AIS data. The results provide a clearly measurable picture of the kinds of trade shocks and consequent pattern changes in port calls over time caused by responses to lockdown policies of varying levels of stringency. We further document the existence of significant shock propagation effects. As the risk of pandemics rises in the twenty-first century, these results can be used by policy makers to assess the potential impact of different levels of lockdown policy on the maritime industry and trade flows more broadly. In the digital era, major shipping lines are developing instant quote and online booking platforms. As one of the first attempts to investigate the post-event effects of this trend, the third study evaluates how a shipping line's online quote platform impacts its shipper portfolio and the ordered container volume. In order to control for unobserved, time-varying effects that could be correlated with the platform's implementation, we apply the regression discontinuity design (RDD) method to the import trade data from 2016 to 2019 of a top shipping line that released its platform in August 2018. We also adopt global polynomial regression and local liner regression so as to control for the effects of different polynomial time trends, and to test different bandwidths of effect time. Our findings suggest that, overall, the container volume assigned to the shipping line declined slightly after the online platform was launched. The container orders of small shippers with monthly container volume of less than 5 TEUs increases by 3.97 TEU on average after online platform adoption. The volume of assigned containers from other shippers, meanwhile, declines. On the whole, this dissertation provides useful insights for stakeholders in shipping industry. Researchers in maritime transportation can learn from the cost studies in air freight transportation to better understand the main economic characteristics of costs. Understanding the effect of lockdown on container port calls helps maritime players to manage their capacity during lockdowns more effectively and to respond more flexibly to changing demand in seaborne transportation. These findings of online quote platform on container orders hold fruitful implications for shipping lines. A significant increase in the number of small shippers and their container volumes demonstrate administrative cost saving and risk mitigation for a shipping line. However, it also leads to possible loss of large customers. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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