The Performance of Seaport Clusters - RePub - Erasmus Universiteit ...

Chapter 8 – Clustering in Seaports 89
Table 19: The importance of water transport as input for manufacturing activities (1999)
Industry (SIC)
Water transport as
% of value added
Relative importance
water transportation 1
Petroleum refining and related products 2.6% 11.47
Crude petroleum and natural gas 1.9% 8.32
Agricultural fertilizers and chemicals 1.7% 7.39
Primary iron and steel manufacturing 1.6% 6.95
Plastics and synthetic materials 1.2% 5.38
Food and kindred products 1.0% 4.44
Gas production and distribution (utilities) 1.0% 4.36
Coal mining 0.7% 3.32
Stone and clay products 0.5% 2.38
Electric services (utilities) 0.5% 2.05
Industrial and other chemicals 0.3% 1.51
Metallic ores mining 0.3% 1.46
General industrial machinery and equipment 0.015% 0.07
Tobacco products 0.005% 0.02
1 The average importance is 1 and calculated as an average of all manufacturing activities Source: US
Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis (2003)
Table 19 shows that water transport is especially important for refining activities and other
manufacturing related to oil or chemical products and iron and steel manufacturing. All of
these require huge volumes of raw materials.
Further evidence to identify manufacturing and trading activities strongly related to the
arrival of goods and services is provided by a ‘localization analysis’. For a number of
manufacturing and trade activities, as well as activities in cargo handling, transport and
logistics, the concentration in seaports is analyzed. For this purpose, the number of firms in
17 metropolitan regions with large seaports of the United States of America is counted 60 and
60 These metro regions are selected by taking the 25 largest ports of the USA and analyzing
whether they are part of a metro-area, so that statistics can be collected. Excluded are the