IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/pal/marecl/v17y2015i2p127-141.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The new European port policy proposals: Too much ado about nothing?

Author

Listed:
  • Hercules Haralambides

    (1] Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands[2] Brindisi Port Authority, Brindisi, Italy.)

  • Michele Acciaro

    (Kühne Logistics University, Hamburg, Germany.)

Abstract

It is widely felt that in order to strengthen the competitiveness of European ports it is needed to ensure fair competition among ports and the sector is anew facing new and old challenges related to its long-term development.These challenges, and arguably the inability of the port sector and the European Union (EU) Member States to meaningfully react to them on their own, are at the basis of the renewed attempt of the European Commission (EC) to develop a uniform and coherent policy package for ports. The article provides a critical account of recent EU policy initiatives, focusing on the most recent attempt of the EC to address some of the issues facing the port sector. The article discusses some of the controversies arising from the new EC policy approach, which, although milder in its contents than the previous attempts, recalls the content of the previous policy proposals, especially in the areas of liberalization of port services; pricing; competition; administrative simplification; financial and operational autonomy; and state aid provisions. The article concludes that the EU not only does not go far enough but, by trying to introduce compromises and conditions of considerable vagueness and ambiguity renders its policy proposals practically useless, thus allowing Member States the freedom to continue unabated as before.

Suggested Citation

  • Hercules Haralambides & Michele Acciaro, 2015. "The new European port policy proposals: Too much ado about nothing?," Maritime Economics & Logistics, Palgrave Macmillan;International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME), vol. 17(2), pages 127-141, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:marecl:v:17:y:2015:i:2:p:127-141
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/mel/journal/v17/n2/pdf/mel20155a.pdf
    File Function: Link to full text PDF
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/mel/journal/v17/n2/full/mel20155a.html
    File Function: Link to full text HTML
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. SangHyun Cheon & Dong-Wook Song & Sungjin Park, 2018. "Does more competition result in better port performance?," Maritime Economics & Logistics, Palgrave Macmillan;International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME), vol. 20(3), pages 433-455, September.
    2. Hercules Haralambides, 2017. "Globalization, public sector reform, and the role of ports in international supply chains," Maritime Economics & Logistics, Palgrave Macmillan;International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME), vol. 19(1), pages 1-51, March.
    3. Marta Gonzalez-Aregall & Kevin Cullinane & Inge Vierth, 2021. "A Review of Port Initiatives to Promote Freight Modal Shifts in Europe: Evidence from Port Governance Systems," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(11), pages 1-19, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:marecl:v:17:y:2015:i:2:p:127-141. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.