“The impact of port throughput on local employment: Evidence from a panel of European regions”

In this paper we study the impact of ports’ activities on local employment by analysing a sample of about 560 regions located in ten West European countries and observed over the period 2000-2006. The biggest European ports within OECD countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) belong to our sample, which includes 116 ports. The empirical analysis is based on the estimation of a set of employment equations with the GMM-System estimator of Blundell and Bond (1998). In particular, our estimation framework allows us to take into account persistence effects in employment, regional unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity, endogeneity of port activity as well as to control for possible other determinants of regional employment, such as innovation activity and some features of the transport infrastructures network, such as the length of the motorways system in the region. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: regional employment is positively correlated to port throughput, while the number of passengers is not; this result probably reflects the high correlation between these two dimensions of a port activity that make it difficult to jointly estimate their impact with a sufficient degree of precision. In second place, we find that the impact of port throughput on employment might depend on the institutional characteristics of each port, with private ports having the largest impact on regional employment of the host region if compared with ports operating under different governance models (“anseatic landlord”, “latin landlord”). Third, we found an higher impact of port throughput if we do not consider the liquid bulk component. Finally, our main results are confirmed if we consider service and manufacturing employment instead than total employment.