Do larger ships visit fewer regions/ports? An empirical analysis on global liners serving China

Abstract

We study empirically how global carriers determine the regions to serve and the number of port calls on the Chinese coast, based on service schedules in 2011–15. Increasing ship size, within a certain range, leads to more clusters/ports visited. Beyond that, container ships visit fewer clusters, not necessarily fewer ports. Therefore, even if two ports are very close, as long as they are efficient, they may both be called at in a service. This signifies the difference between the hub-and-spoke structure in liner shipping and that in aviation, where it is unnecessary to have two hubs in the same place.