This paper examines the development modes of inland ports based on the economic models and the Chinese empirical cases. After reviewing the recent policies in China, four modes, i.e., the government-driven mode, the seaport-driven, the market-driven mode and the corridor-effect mode, are established to describe the development of Chinese inland ports from the perspective of the driving forces. Moreover, we setup an economic model to compare them and conclude that (1) the seaport-driven mode promotes the larger inland port than the corridor-effect mode and the market-driven mode; (2) if the marginal capacity investment cost is low or the efficiency of the inland port is high enough, the corridor-effect mode leads to higher social welfare than the market-driven mode and the seaport-driven mode; (3) whether the government-driven mode promotes the larger inland port and higher social welfare than the other modes depends on the positive externality from the inland port to the social welfare; (4) The ‘Go west’ policy and the Belt and Road Initiative (B&R) promote the inland port capacity under all modes. Whether the Free Trade Zone (FTZ) and the port integration promote the inland port capacity depends on the port efficiency improvement after the implementation of these policies.

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This paper uses a real option approach to analyze terminal investment timing decisions for situations in which a port faces competition from its rivals in an uncertain market. We propose a network model to describe carriers’ cargo routing decisions and competition among rival ports. We then transform this model into a multicommodity flow problem and use the column generation algorithm to solve it. After obtaining a port’s possible future annual revenues and the potential net present value (NPV) for its terminal construction project through the network model, we adopt the expanded NPV rule and transform the investment timing decision into an optimal stopping problem. A least squares Monte Carlo simulation algorithm is proposed to find the investing probabilities for future years. The proposed models are applied to a steel cargo terminal investment case in the Port of Bengbu in Anhui province of China. The impacts on the investing probability and the expanded NPV of changes in the demand volatility, the initial investment and the port discharging rate are analyzed to provide managerial insights for port managers.

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This article studies port dual regulation mechanisms in which a central government and a local government act either simultaneously or sequentially. Optimal tariffs, port capacities and port efficiency levels under these dual regulation schemes are determined following a principal-agent approach. The theoretical research can assist the thinking process that prevails during the shaping of regulatory systems in the port sector. Moreover, the theoretical results obtained are applied to a case study involving the container terminals in the Port of Shanghai in China. Sensitivity analysis and comparative studies show that (i) dual regulation causes the highest distortion when the central government and the local government act sequentially, (ii) the port operator obtains the highest profit when the central- and local government act sequentially, (iii) the distortion becomes worse when the port operator’s cost increases, the weight of the port operator’s profit in the government’s objectives decreases, or the sensitivity of port demand with respect to its price increases.@en

This paper proposes and investigates three schemes for cost allocation in a container shipping alliance considering the economies of scale. In order to deal with the complicated interactions between carriers and the impact of the economies of scale on shipping cost, a duality-based, an inverse optimisation-based and a Shapley value-based scheme are discussed and compared to the conventional demand-based and turnover-based schemes. The theoretical models are applied in a case study involving the Asia-Europe container shipping lines of the CKYH alliance. The application results and the sensitivity analysis illustrate the practicability of our schemes.

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